If you store all your data in the cloud, it might be hard to fathom an external hard drive doing double duty as a status symbol.
That's exactly what the sleek, wildly fast, and eye-wateringly expensive Samsung Portable SSD X5 ($699 for 1TB) is, though.
Following in the footsteps of both Samsung's own flagship external drives like the Portable SSD T5 and design-forward works of hard drive art from LaCie and others, the X5 offers copious amounts of solid-state storage at extreme speeds, thanks to its use of the cutting-edge Thunderbolt 3 and PCI Express NVMe interfaces.
It would make a killer gift for Mac-bound video editors who shoot in 4K or photographers who work in RAW, but it's overkill for pretty much anyone else.
No Speed Limits
If you're a denizen of cloud storage like Google One or iCloud, bound by network-access speeds to your data, your eyes might glaze over when your tech-savvy friends insist on the superiority of the solid-state drive (SSD) over the regular old spinning hard drive.
How right they are, though.
If you use an SSD as your main boot drive, it will make your computer feel much faster than if it uses a hard drive.
But things get more complicated when it comes to external drives that you plug into your laptop or desktop with a cable.
The speed of those drives depends as much on the speed of the cable and the port to which it's connected as it does on whether or not the drive is an SSD or a platter-based hard drive.
To wit, you could buy an external RAID array full of regular hard drives, such as the Akitio Thunder3 RAID that connects via a Thunderbolt 3 cable and delivers much faster speeds than a run-of-the-mill external SSD like the ADATA SE730($57.99 at Amazon).
Not only does that drive use a 5GBps USB 3.0 port, which has just an eighth of the potential maximum bandwidth of the 40GBps Thunderbolt 3 connector, but internally, the SATA architecture that it shares with most other affordable external SSDs limits it to a theoretical maximum of around 500MBps.
If that all sounds complicated, all you need to know is that the Samsung Portable SSD X5 has none of these limitations.
Not only does it use Thunderbolt 3, but it also makes use of the PCI Express (PCIe) NVMe interface, which means that its data transfer rates are stratospheric compared with even the likes of our current Editors' Choice for external SSDs, Samsung's own Portable SSD T5.
Samsung claims that the 1TB version of the Portable SSD X5 that I tested can read data at a maximum of 2,800MBps, and you can write data to it at 2,300MBps.
There's also a 2TB version with identical maximum rated speeds, and a 500GB model with the same read speed but a rated write speed of 2,100MBps.
In essence, the X5 promises to be faster than even the boot drive in your Mac or PC, unless it is using a high-end PCIe NVMe boot drive like the Samsung SSD 970 EVO.
Yep, It's Really Fast
And the Portable SSD X5 delivers on its promise.
Its 2,326MBps write score and 1,828MBps read score on our Blackmagic throughput benchmark make it the fastest single-drive external drive we've ever tested.
This a significant achievement when you compare the Portable SSD X5 to other small external SSDs that use SATA and the USB 3.0 or USB 3.1 connectors.
The Portable SSD T5 achieved 506MBps read speeds and 477MBps write speeds on the Blackmagic test, while the cheaper ADATA SD700 recorded 421MBps reads and 413MBps writes.
The X5's achievement is even more impressive when you consider that the next-fastest drives on this test are huge, bulky desktop drives like the LaCie Bolt 3( at Amazon) and the Akitio Thunder3 RAID, whose read scores top out at around 2,000MBps.
You could transfer a ton of video footage very quickly with this sort of throughput.
For example, in its own testing, Samsung was able to move a single 20GB file of 4K video footage from the Portable SSD X5 to a PC in just over 10 seconds, which is four times faster than the T5 is capable of.
Moving a 20GB 4K video file back to the drive results in even greater speed gains, according to Samsung: just over 11 seconds, or five times faster than the T5's speed on the same task.
Indeed, the Portable SSD X5's proficiency at dragging and dropping was apparent on PC Labs' own version of this test, which involves moving a 1.3GB folder full of mixed file types from the SSD boot drive on our Apple MacBook Pro testbed to the external drive.
It accomplished this in just 1 second, which corresponds to a slower rate than Samsung achieved with its single large 4K video file.
But transferring many different file types of different sizes is more taxing, and the Portable SSD X5 was again the fastest drive we've tested on this benchmark.
A few large external desktop drives come close, at 2 seconds, while the Portable SSD T5 took 3 seconds.
That was the sum of my formal benchmarking.
While trying to perform my last external drive benchmark, the Secondary Storage Test in PCMark 7, I ran into some issues.
This is an older program designed to simulate a large variety of tasks, going beyond just transferring files back and forth to include things like using the external drive as a scratch disk for video editing.
Alas, the test is not optimized for Thunderbolt 3 or PCIe NVMe, and it simply would not run at all on the Portable SSD X5.
A Big Note: No USB Support
While speed is the X5's calling card, its incompatibility with the PCMark 7 storage benchmark belies a larger issue: Unlike every other external drive we've tested recently, the Portable SSD X5 is not officially compatible with USB of any kind.
You must use it with a Thunderbolt 3-equipped PC or Mac.
In fact, just for kicks, I tried to connect it to a USB Type-C port on a Windows machine, to no avail.
The system knew that something was plugged in, but it would not recognize it as a drive.
More concerning: The Thunderbolt 3 support on PC laptops and desktops was temperamental at best in my anecdotal tests.
You won't find Thunderbolt 3 ports on most inexpensive laptops or desktops.
Even though the small, racetrack-shaped Thunderbolt 3 connector looks identical to a USB Type-C one, it's more complicated than that.
You must have a Thunderbolt 3 cable—Samsung supplies one in the Portable SSD X5's box—and a Thunderbolt 3 port on your computer, typically identified by a lightning-bolt icon next to it.
Even if your PC does have Thunderbolt 3 support, attaching a Thunderbolt 3 accessory like the Portable SSD X5 isn't always plug-and-play.
Intel's Thunderbolt software must be running in the background to recognize the drive, but this software, in my experience, doesn't always work.
It would not run at all on a Dell Precision workstation or an Alienware laptop to which I tried to connect the Portable SSD X5, and while it ran on an Asus ZenBook Pro, the X5 was not recognized until I removed it from the devices list in the Windows Control Panel and then reconnected it.
The upshot is that the Portable SSD X5, like most Thunderbolt 3 peripherals, is most reliable when connected to a late-model Apple MacBook, MacBook Pro, or iMac.
Our MacBook Pro testbed had no trouble recognizing it and mounting it as an external drive on the desktop within a few seconds.
The Portable SSD X5 isn't the only Thunderbolt 3-exclusive PCIe NVMe external SSD.
For example, Dell's competing Portable Thunderbolt 3 SSD, available in 500GB or 1TB capacities, offers similar read speeds of 2,800MBps.
We haven't tested this or any other such drives yet.
It's Got the Look
Since you're likely to connect the Portable SSD X5 to a Mac, you'll be pleased to know that it's a slick-looking drive, even more so than Samsung's other external drives, to my eyes.
It's bright red on the bottom and has a shiny, dark-metallic finish on the top, so it won't necessarily blend with your Space Gray MacBook, but it certainly won't look ugly next to it, either.
It has a sophistication all its own.
In addition to oozing style, the Portable SSD X5's physical enclosure is quite robust.
Samsung says it can withstand drops of up to 6.5 feet, thanks in part to a shock-resistant internal frame.
There's also an internal heat sink to deal with the significant heat that a PCIe NVMe SSD generates.
Indeed, the drive did become warm—though not hot—to the touch while it was connected.
The Portable SSD X5's only physical downside is its weight.
All of that internal protection adds up to a drive that weighs 5.3 ounces.
It feels hefty in your hand, and it's especially unwieldy compared with the feather-light SE730 (1.3 ounces), the Portable SSD T5 (1.6 ounces), and even the Dell Thunderbolt 3 drive (2.2 ounces).
The drive's included software is minimal.
Don't expect any free backup utilities, but then again, using this lightning-fast drive as a backup disk would be a waste of its potential.
You do get a Windows and macOS app called Samsung Portable SSD that allows you to update the drive's firmware and select a password to activate the built-in AES 256-bit hardware encryption.
Password protection is a good idea, but beware that encrypting the drive could have a small negative effect on performance; I tested the drive without a password.
See How We Test Hard Drives
Samsung offers a generous three-year warranty for the X5, although, like any warranty, it can't help you if a failed drive corrupts your data.
This warranty period matches the one Dell offers for its portable Thunderbolt 3 SSD.
Had a Real Good Year? Treat Yourself to an X5
Until this point, the Portable SSD X5's super-fast speeds far outweigh the drive's downsides, the most significant of which is lack of USB support, which won't be an issue if you're using it exclusively with a newer, Thunderbolt 3-equipped Mac.
But that doesn't take into account the drive's Achilles' heel: the price.
At $699 for 1TB, the Portable SSD X5 costs 70 cents per gigabyte.
The same sky-high cost per gigabyte applies to the $1,400 2TB model.
The $400 500GB model is even worse, at 80 cents per gigabyte.
That said, it's in line with the $799 1TB version of the Dell Thunderbolt 3 SSD.
Compare these prices with the Portable SSD T5, whose 1TB version currently costs $280, or 28 cents per gigabyte.
If you're a professional video editor or photographer who wants to celebrate a banner year by blowing some of your extra cash on extremely fast, stylish external storage for a Mac, the X5 is begging for your bucks, and it should serve you very well.
Everyone else in the market for an external SSD should stick with the Portable SSD T5, or another USB-based option that will fetch far more gigabytes per dollar.
Pros
Extremely fast data transfer speeds, thanks to Thunderbolt 3 and PCIe NVMe interfaces.
Multiple capacity options.
Sleek design.
The Bottom Line
The sleek, expensive Samsung Portable SSD X5 offers the fastest single-drive external storage money can buy, but it's suited mainly to well-heeled content-creation pros using late-model Macs.
If you store all your data in the cloud, it might be hard to fathom an external hard drive doing double duty as a status symbol.
That's exactly what the sleek, wildly fast, and eye-wateringly expensive Samsung Portable SSD X5 ($699 for 1TB) is, though.
Following in the footsteps of both Samsung's own flagship external drives like the Portable SSD T5 and design-forward works of hard drive art from LaCie and others, the X5 offers copious amounts of solid-state storage at extreme speeds, thanks to its use of the cutting-edge Thunderbolt 3 and PCI Express NVMe interfaces.
It would make a killer gift for Mac-bound video editors who shoot in 4K or photographers who work in RAW, but it's overkill for pretty much anyone else.
No Speed Limits
If you're a denizen of cloud storage like Google One or iCloud, bound by network-access speeds to your data, your eyes might glaze over when your tech-savvy friends insist on the superiority of the solid-state drive (SSD) over the regular old spinning hard drive.
How right they are, though.
If you use an SSD as your main boot drive, it will make your computer feel much faster than if it uses a hard drive.
But things get more complicated when it comes to external drives that you plug into your laptop or desktop with a cable.
The speed of those drives depends as much on the speed of the cable and the port to which it's connected as it does on whether or not the drive is an SSD or a platter-based hard drive.
To wit, you could buy an external RAID array full of regular hard drives, such as the Akitio Thunder3 RAID that connects via a Thunderbolt 3 cable and delivers much faster speeds than a run-of-the-mill external SSD like the ADATA SE730($57.99 at Amazon).
Not only does that drive use a 5GBps USB 3.0 port, which has just an eighth of the potential maximum bandwidth of the 40GBps Thunderbolt 3 connector, but internally, the SATA architecture that it shares with most other affordable external SSDs limits it to a theoretical maximum of around 500MBps.
If that all sounds complicated, all you need to know is that the Samsung Portable SSD X5 has none of these limitations.
Not only does it use Thunderbolt 3, but it also makes use of the PCI Express (PCIe) NVMe interface, which means that its data transfer rates are stratospheric compared with even the likes of our current Editors' Choice for external SSDs, Samsung's own Portable SSD T5.
Samsung claims that the 1TB version of the Portable SSD X5 that I tested can read data at a maximum of 2,800MBps, and you can write data to it at 2,300MBps.
There's also a 2TB version with identical maximum rated speeds, and a 500GB model with the same read speed but a rated write speed of 2,100MBps.
In essence, the X5 promises to be faster than even the boot drive in your Mac or PC, unless it is using a high-end PCIe NVMe boot drive like the Samsung SSD 970 EVO.
Yep, It's Really Fast
And the Portable SSD X5 delivers on its promise.
Its 2,326MBps write score and 1,828MBps read score on our Blackmagic throughput benchmark make it the fastest single-drive external drive we've ever tested.
This a significant achievement when you compare the Portable SSD X5 to other small external SSDs that use SATA and the USB 3.0 or USB 3.1 connectors.
The Portable SSD T5 achieved 506MBps read speeds and 477MBps write speeds on the Blackmagic test, while the cheaper ADATA SD700 recorded 421MBps reads and 413MBps writes.
The X5's achievement is even more impressive when you consider that the next-fastest drives on this test are huge, bulky desktop drives like the LaCie Bolt 3( at Amazon) and the Akitio Thunder3 RAID, whose read scores top out at around 2,000MBps.
You could transfer a ton of video footage very quickly with this sort of throughput.
For example, in its own testing, Samsung was able to move a single 20GB file of 4K video footage from the Portable SSD X5 to a PC in just over 10 seconds, which is four times faster than the T5 is capable of.
Moving a 20GB 4K video file back to the drive results in even greater speed gains, according to Samsung: just over 11 seconds, or five times faster than the T5's speed on the same task.
Indeed, the Portable SSD X5's proficiency at dragging and dropping was apparent on PC Labs' own version of this test, which involves moving a 1.3GB folder full of mixed file types from the SSD boot drive on our Apple MacBook Pro testbed to the external drive.
It accomplished this in just 1 second, which corresponds to a slower rate than Samsung achieved with its single large 4K video file.
But transferring many different file types of different sizes is more taxing, and the Portable SSD X5 was again the fastest drive we've tested on this benchmark.
A few large external desktop drives come close, at 2 seconds, while the Portable SSD T5 took 3 seconds.
That was the sum of my formal benchmarking.
While trying to perform my last external drive benchmark, the Secondary Storage Test in PCMark 7, I ran into some issues.
This is an older program designed to simulate a large variety of tasks, going beyond just transferring files back and forth to include things like using the external drive as a scratch disk for video editing.
Alas, the test is not optimized for Thunderbolt 3 or PCIe NVMe, and it simply would not run at all on the Portable SSD X5.
A Big Note: No USB Support
While speed is the X5's calling card, its incompatibility with the PCMark 7 storage benchmark belies a larger issue: Unlike every other external drive we've tested recently, the Portable SSD X5 is not officially compatible with USB of any kind.
You must use it with a Thunderbolt 3-equipped PC or Mac.
In fact, just for kicks, I tried to connect it to a USB Type-C port on a Windows machine, to no avail.
The system knew that something was plugged in, but it would not recognize it as a drive.
More concerning: The Thunderbolt 3 support on PC laptops and desktops was temperamental at best in my anecdotal tests.
You won't find Thunderbolt 3 ports on most inexpensive laptops or desktops.
Even though the small, racetrack-shaped Thunderbolt 3 connector looks identical to a USB Type-C one, it's more complicated than that.
You must have a Thunderbolt 3 cable—Samsung supplies one in the Portable SSD X5's box—and a Thunderbolt 3 port on your computer, typically identified by a lightning-bolt icon next to it.
Even if your PC does have Thunderbolt 3 support, attaching a Thunderbolt 3 accessory like the Portable SSD X5 isn't always plug-and-play.
Intel's Thunderbolt software must be running in the background to recognize the drive, but this software, in my experience, doesn't always work.
It would not run at all on a Dell Precision workstation or an Alienware laptop to which I tried to connect the Portable SSD X5, and while it ran on an Asus ZenBook Pro, the X5 was not recognized until I removed it from the devices list in the Windows Control Panel and then reconnected it.
The upshot is that the Portable SSD X5, like most Thunderbolt 3 peripherals, is most reliable when connected to a late-model Apple MacBook, MacBook Pro, or iMac.
Our MacBook Pro testbed had no trouble recognizing it and mounting it as an external drive on the desktop within a few seconds.
The Portable SSD X5 isn't the only Thunderbolt 3-exclusive PCIe NVMe external SSD.
For example, Dell's competing Portable Thunderbolt 3 SSD, available in 500GB or 1TB capacities, offers similar read speeds of 2,800MBps.
We haven't tested this or any other such drives yet.
It's Got the Look
Since you're likely to connect the Portable SSD X5 to a Mac, you'll be pleased to know that it's a slick-looking drive, even more so than Samsung's other external drives, to my eyes.
It's bright red on the bottom and has a shiny, dark-metallic finish on the top, so it won't necessarily blend with your Space Gray MacBook, but it certainly won't look ugly next to it, either.
It has a sophistication all its own.
In addition to oozing style, the Portable SSD X5's physical enclosure is quite robust.
Samsung says it can withstand drops of up to 6.5 feet, thanks in part to a shock-resistant internal frame.
There's also an internal heat sink to deal with the significant heat that a PCIe NVMe SSD generates.
Indeed, the drive did become warm—though not hot—to the touch while it was connected.
The Portable SSD X5's only physical downside is its weight.
All of that internal protection adds up to a drive that weighs 5.3 ounces.
It feels hefty in your hand, and it's especially unwieldy compared with the feather-light SE730 (1.3 ounces), the Portable SSD T5 (1.6 ounces), and even the Dell Thunderbolt 3 drive (2.2 ounces).
The drive's included software is minimal.
Don't expect any free backup utilities, but then again, using this lightning-fast drive as a backup disk would be a waste of its potential.
You do get a Windows and macOS app called Samsung Portable SSD that allows you to update the drive's firmware and select a password to activate the built-in AES 256-bit hardware encryption.
Password protection is a good idea, but beware that encrypting the drive could have a small negative effect on performance; I tested the drive without a password.
See How We Test Hard Drives
Samsung offers a generous three-year warranty for the X5, although, like any warranty, it can't help you if a failed drive corrupts your data.
This warranty period matches the one Dell offers for its portable Thunderbolt 3 SSD.
Had a Real Good Year? Treat Yourself to an X5
Until this point, the Portable SSD X5's super-fast speeds far outweigh the drive's downsides, the most significant of which is lack of USB support, which won't be an issue if you're using it exclusively with a newer, Thunderbolt 3-equipped Mac.
But that doesn't take into account the drive's Achilles' heel: the price.
At $699 for 1TB, the Portable SSD X5 costs 70 cents per gigabyte.
The same sky-high cost per gigabyte applies to the $1,400 2TB model.
The $400 500GB model is even worse, at 80 cents per gigabyte.
That said, it's in line with the $799 1TB version of the Dell Thunderbolt 3 SSD.
Compare these prices with the Portable SSD T5, whose 1TB version currently costs $280, or 28 cents per gigabyte.
If you're a professional video editor or photographer who wants to celebrate a banner year by blowing some of your extra cash on extremely fast, stylish external storage for a Mac, the X5 is begging for your bucks, and it should serve you very well.
Everyone else in the market for an external SSD should stick with the Portable SSD T5, or another USB-based option that will fetch far more gigabytes per dollar.
Pros
Extremely fast data transfer speeds, thanks to Thunderbolt 3 and PCIe NVMe interfaces.
Multiple capacity options.
Sleek design.
The Bottom Line
The sleek, expensive Samsung Portable SSD X5 offers the fastest single-drive external storage money can buy, but it's suited mainly to well-heeled content-creation pros using late-model Macs.
