Bummer.īlack Magic’s Disk Speed measures only large file transfers. The X5 seems to have enough room for a jack, but I guess wires aren’t sexy and direct AC would add extra circuitry. The X5 has no AC jack so there’s simply no way to power it. The drive runs on bus power and Apple’s adapter-the only one I’m aware of that allows connecting Thunderbolt 3 devices to earlier-version ports-doesn’t transmit bus power. Sadly, users of older Thunderbolt 1 and 2 Macs won’t be able to use the X5.
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Samsung Portable SSD X5: Not so compatible
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According to media relations, the drive is based on a 970 EVO with the same 64-layer, TLC NAND. The X5 also features encryption and can be password protected using the supplied Samsung utility. According to a cutaway picture in the guide, there’s an NVMe adapter board with a M.2 NVMe SSD sitting in a slot. Since I didn’t want to destroy the unit by prying it open, I had to rely on Samsung’s reviewer’s guide and a few questions to media relations to ascertain the contents of the drive. It is a bit heftier than the average external drive, so that will help some. The underside of the X5 is red, hard, and doesn’t provide a lot of traction to keep it from moving about. I didn’t notice undue heat, so the copious amount of magnesium is doing its job well.
Part of the aforementioned heft is an internal heat sink, which no doubt radiates heat to the external shell. Fortunately, the drive is largely constructed from magnesium and is said to be able to withstand a two meter drop. You rely on its not inconsiderable (for a portable SSD) 5.3 ounces of heft and the Thunderbolt 3 cable to ward off accidental movement. I’m a bit puzzled about the bottom of the drive, as it’s a rather hard substance that provides little friction or horizontal stability. The X5 is dark silver on the top, and a bright off-red on the bottom. Samsung made some interesting style choices with its first Thunderbolt 3 NVMe drive. Only the USB-C/Thunderbolt 3 port is a hint as to the X5’s function, though by that measure it could just as easily be a USB 3.1 drive. Don’t let my mention of a hand phaser influence you. Take a look below and make up your own mind. Then again, I haven’t seen the super car they had in mind. Samsung says it was inspired by a super car, but I’m not seeing it. The first thing that struck me about the X5 is that it doesn’t look particularly like external storage. Samsung Portable SSD X5: Design and features I love NVMe, and it does makes a perfromance difference, but 500MBps isn’t exactly chicken feed. On the other hand, you can get a 1TB Samsung T5 or a Sandisk Extreme external SSD with a USB 3.1 10Gbps interface for less than $300. You might save a couple of bucks at the 2TB level, but the resulting device would hardly fit in your pocket. By the time you add an enclosure (as far as I’m aware there are no “portable” Thunderbolt 3 NVMe/PCIe enclosures available), you’d be somewhere in the neighborhood of $400 to $500. If it helps, that’s actually not as “Apple-priced” as it looks a bare 1TB Samsung 970 EVO NVMe SSD goes for around $300.
The X5 is a blazingly fast and expensive drive: $400 for 500GB, $700 for 1TB, and $1,400 for 2TB. The X5 is now the portable drive for multimedia pros, or anyone who doesn’t like to wait for their files to copy-if you can afford it, and of course, have Thunderbolt 3.
And for a while, the path to external storage nirvana was a bit of a rocky road-but the bumpy ride is over now thanks to Samsung’s Portable SSD X5, a ready-made NVMe over Thunderbolt 3 storage solution that delivers blazingly fast 2GBps-plus read and write speeds Once Apple finally introduced support for third-party NVMe drives in macOS 10.12 Sierra, NVMe over Thunderbolt storage became only a matter of time.
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