Amazon.com: Customer reviews: Samsung T3 Portable SSD - 250GB

Reviewed in the United States on May 7, 2017

The list price on a MacBook Pro 15 w/Retina, 16GB, 1TB SSD drive is around $3,000. That's a lot of money. Since 2013, MacBook Pro's have come with NO swappable/fixable/upgradable components. If you are out of warranty and something inside is defective or broken -- you are out of luck. Or so I thought..

I didn't realize it, but the 1TB, $700 SSD drive hard soldered to the motherboard inside my 3 year old laptop was bad. How do I know? Because once I moved my operating system (macos Sierra) to a Samsung T3 (and started running my O/S in tethered mode), there have been 0 crashes.

Sure.. Being tethered is like a ball & chain -- but hey.. the "ball" weighs nothing (and the cable is under no strain). New Life! Now my laptop works great - no speed degradation. For the first time, I can consider selling it at upgrade time(unthinkable with it crashing all the time).

Out of the box I used the software on the special SETUP_T3 partition to set a 16 character password. Once you do that you can treat the drive like any other -- seamless encryption. I formatted it for Apple and cloned my O/S to it. The real partition (encrypted) is INVISIBLE until you run the special software first on the smaller partition (SETUP_T3). Once you enter your password on the Samsung prompt, the SETUP_T3 disk disconnects (rudely -- generating harmless, but unsettling "Disk Not Ejected Properly" message popup).

Quirkiness... the cost of encryption.. From a completely powered off mode, you can't boot into the encrypted partition on the Samsung. Patience! Boot into another drive (in my case the SSD inside my laptop) and run the little program on partition SETUP_T3. I enter my 16 digit password and then restart. After rebooting, the laptop can "see" (find) the data/bootable partition and load the O/S. So each time you power down completely you have a double boot -- but its super fast on an SSD. As long as you don't power down, you can reboot any number of times without entering your Samsung SETUP_T3 password. The speed on my USB 3.0 port is 380MB/s according to a free speed tool. I believe that is half as fast as the Apple SSD "drive" inside my laptop - but not noticable). To give you some idea of what that means.. My old 5400RPM drive goes at about 30MB/s speed (10 times slower than the Samsung T3).

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Caleb Kierum

Best hard drive in the market

Reviewed in the United States on July 9, 2017

Capacity: 1 TBVerified Purchase

This is the best external hard drive out there (June 2017)! It is reliable, light, and surprisingly small. Its speeds are quite impressive and match what is advertised.

This SSD also comes with a 3 year warranty which is great in the unlikely event that there is a manufacturing error.

It was easy to reformat and works well with my MacBook Pro.

My only wish is that it would come with a USB-C to USB-C cable so I wouldn't have to use an adapter with my Mac's ports. I ended up buying USB 3.1 Type C Cable 1FT - 3 Pack, FosPower Reversible USB 3.1 (Gen 2) Type C to Type C Nylon Braided Cord for Nintendo Switch, MacBook, Galaxy S8/S8 Plus, LG G6, Google Pixel/XL, HTC 10 & More to make the connection easier for me. I am also using a Mountie by Ten One Design - Mount Your Phone or Tablet to Your Laptop - an Instant Second Screen for Your Computer Monitor (T1-MULT-109) - Blue to attach it to my MacBook when I am using it for extended periods of time.

I keep recommending this drive to friends because it is so great!

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Drawring Simon

Wow it's fast (as expected), using for Time Machine backup

Reviewed in the United States on November 22, 2016

Capacity: 500 GBVerified Purchase

Lesson learned, use the right cable. The included cable provides good speed, but since I was on a usb c only computer, I just grabbed the first usb c cable I could find and I knew it was a mistake. Don't use the Apple usb c cable if you want the max speed. Fortunately I made the correct assumption that this was user error and not a defective drive.

I'm using this as my Time Machine backup on my 2016 MBP. But first I wanted to test the speed that I paid for. I compared this to a relatively fast Toshiba external HDD, transferring files from my internal SSD to the Toshiba HDD and to this T3 SSD. The traditional HDD transferred at 105 MB/s. Then my first test on this drive gave me 41 MB/s, slower than the HDD! This was the Apple cable included as a usb c power cable. I tried the included cable with a usb c to a adapter and I got 422 MB/s, more in line with expectations. Next I tried a spare usb c cable I had from my Kensington dock and I got the same 422 MB/s as the included cable. 4x the speed of the HDD.

For Time Machine specifics, I tested this against the HDD. Using the journaled, encrypted backup, you don't get the same speed differences. Apparently, the encryption is as much as a bottleneck as the transfer. Compared to the usb 2.0 Apple cable, I got about a 50%-100% speed increase. The HDD was similar to the SSD speed. Basically, it's a waste to use this on Time Machine for encrypted backups.

This being my first external SSD drive, it is obviously the fastest portable drive I've ever used. It's a shame I'm using it only to back up my computer and not for speed sensitive needs. This has so many possibilities. As soon as I find another need, this will be repurposed for more glamorous work.

Edit: Time Machine actually backs up at about 2-3x the speed of a HDD. Pretty significant on the first backup, but isn't a big advantage with each subsequent backup which only copies incremental changes if backed up regularly. Still undecided on how much I need to use this for backups.

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Brian Walen

Costly but very fast USB SSD

Reviewed in the United States on October 7, 2016

Capacity: 250 GBVerified Purchase

This is the fastest USB drive i've ever owned. It's pricing is a fair bit higher than others, but it really justifies the cost even at the higher tiers. On desktops/laptops, you'll transfer files faster than ever before, especially larger ones like movies.

Samsung also includes software to password-protect the drive, which is compatible with both Windows and MacOS.

I also tried this out on my Xbox One, loading up some of the games that I've had troubles with loading times on, and I'm happy to say that it dos help some, but it's probably not worth the price premium there unless you've got the money to burn.

The included USB Type-A to Type-C cable is short, but gets the job done. I don't have any other USB-C devices so I was fine with just the one cable, but if you have any USB-C devices (laptops, phones, etc.), you will probably need to invest in a USB-C to USB-C cable.

You really don't get a sense for how small this thing is until you hold it in your hands. And it is VERY small once you're holding it. It's fantastic for traveling (I'll be picking up another one to load my movies on for when i'm on the go) due to its very small size, and you don't have to worry about it getting beat up while traveling since there are no moving parts inside.

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Patrick H. Mullins

Fantastic External SSD Drive!

Reviewed in the United States on May 17, 2017

Capacity: 500 GBVerified Purchase

These external SSD drives from Samsung are fantastic for anyone whose looking for both portability, reliability, and fast read/write speeds in a small, rugged package. Just how fast are these drives? For my tests I decided to use the Disk Speed Test application from Blackmagic Design. This is a nifty little MacOS application that allows you to easily stress test any drive that you can connect to your computer.

First, I started by testing the internal 512GB Apple SSD in my laptop and got a staggering 1604 MB/s write and 2604 MB/s read speed. Those are insane numbers! No wonder these new MacBooks feel so fast. Next, I tested the Samsung T3 and was pleasantly surprised to see quick 392 MB/s write and 404 MB/s read speeds. Sure, that's no where near as fast as the internal SSD, but it's crazy fast compared to traditional spinning disk media. Just to be fair, I also tested my external G-Drive which uses an HGST 7200RPM internal drive. The HGST, as expected, scored woeful slow speeds of only 28 MB/s write and 24 MB/s read.

As you can see, these Samsung SSD drives fall nicely between traditional drives and Apple's insanely fast SSD drives. In fact, these are so nice that I've gone all SSD for backing up the internal SSD in my laptop and for archiving my personal files. Yes, you can get twice as much space for half as much money when you buy a 72000RPM platter-based drive. However, the pathetically slow speeds will soon have you pulling your hair out. Do yourself a huge favor and just stick with SSD drives and this Samsung drive in particular. You can thank me later. :-)

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Lon J. Seidman

A great portable storage product.

Reviewed in the United States on March 20, 2016

Capacity: 500 GBVerified Purchase

The media could not be loaded.

UPDATE -- Oddly enough my T3 is now performing at the same speed as my T1. Whatever performance issues my device had when I first began using it have now disappeared. Perhaps some early wear leveling? I will be updating my review on YouTube to reflect the changes and will upload something here as well.

The Samsung T3's exterior casing is and improvement over the prior version of the product. It' snow metal and much more rugged, it sports a reversible USB type C connector, and it now works out of the box without additional software installation.

This is a great portable storage device that's fast enough for just about any use that might be thrown its way. Great for general video editing (even multicamera 4k edits) and certainly more than adequate for gaming. I use a bunch of these as field editing drives for my YouTube channel and have found them to be every bit as good as desktop class SATA SSD drives.

You will need to buy a USB-C to USB-C cable for connecting to a USB-C PC, however. The cable it comes with is a USB-C to standard USB 3.0 connector.

NOTE: I purchased one of these originally and later received one via the Amazon Vine program.

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Jeffery

Great product but some cons need to mention before purchase.

Reviewed in the United States on December 9, 2016

Capacity: 500 GBVerified Purchase

The Samsung T3 SSD external hard drive is an amazing product.
Pro: 1. small and ultra portable
2. super fast transfer speed (when use my own usb-c to usb-c cable)
3. sick design
Con: 1. Only come with USB-C to USB-A Cable
2. Only getting 172mb/s read speed when using the factory usb-c to usb-a cable
Since so many people and professional youtubers commented about how good this product is, I would like to talk about those two cons I mentioned above.
when I purchased a product saying usb-c native ssd, I assume it will come with a usb-c to usb-c cable. And paying $20 more just to get a cable to make this drive work with the new macbook really add up the total cost.
Second, I don't know why such an advanced ssd will limit it's transmitting speed when using it's factory cable (my Mac detected this drive as a USB 3.0 drive when using the factory cable).
But if you don't mind spending $20 more on an usb 3.1 enable usb-c cable, this drive will be a perfect product.

9 people found this helpful

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J. M. Copening

You'll Never Want An External HDD Again

Reviewed in the United States on July 9, 2016

Capacity: 500 GBVerified Purchase

Once you taste an internal SSD, you never want to go back. Same is true of this external SSD. I purchased it to augment the storage on a Macbook Air in which my iTunes library was becoming too big. I offloaded a lot of the video media to this device. I didn't make a point to watch transfer time, but it transferred about 150gb in practically the blink of an eye (maybe 5 minutes actually). Spinning external drives, like a WD Passport, are much slower over USB3 than this device. It is simply faster than I thought it would be as an external drive. Movie playback is perfect.

The drive feels very sturdy in its enclosure. The drive is about half the size of an iPhone, and maybe a little thicker. So it is small. I bought an accompanying 3rd party case so that it is a little bit better protected when I travel, but the drive doesn't feel like it would break all that easily even if I didn't have the case. I don't know the longevity of the drive yet, but if it is like other Samsung drives I imagine it will last a long while, especially since I don't plan to plug it in every day. The cord that comes with it is plenty long for my purposes and any laptop. It may be a bit short for a desktop though.

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Rajesh Jain

Updated: Mac users, please be careful, or you will lose data one day.

Reviewed in the United States on June 20, 2016

Capacity: 1 TBVerified Purchase

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Smaller Version:

If you are a Mac user, and have either bought the Drive already, or plan to buy the Drive, for its hardware assisted encryption capabilities, please look elsewhere. If you do use the Samsung software to enable encryption on the Drive, I predict that one day your drive will fail to unlock, and you will lose all your data. So, backup VERY often, especially NOT on another Samsung T3.

Pros.:
1. Its an SSD for gods sake! So automatically its better than a Spinning Hard Drive!
2. The speed is as advertised. (Roughly 375MB/s Write, 400MB/s Read). It's pretty good.
3. Its Small, and light. Awesome to carry around.

Cons:
1. It gets hot! I copied about 24,000 files for a total 220 Gig (GB) of data to migrate from my old drive to new.
2. When it got hot, the drive slowed down substantially! But, still maintained better performance than a spinner. We'll see how it stands up to everyday use.
3. DONOT PUT YOUR LIFE ON THE LINE (especially Mac guys), you will probably lose your data one day when your mac, or other machines, refuse to unlock the drive!
4. The cable, which has a USB Type C connector on one end and the regular USB on the other side, is a bit too rigid. The drive feels lighter, and more manageable than the cable!!
5. (This one you should already know)-While Samsung says it supports USB 3.1, and has the fancy Type-C connector, its really USB 3.0 but with UASP (SuperSpeed). The USB Standards gods just want to confuse everyone.

I must clarify, this is for the *** 1TB *** drive; I do not know if the 2TB version is any different or better because I don't have it. Also, I must say that your mileage may vary. Clearly there are a lot of people who have given 5 stars. But in all consciousness, I can't give it more than 3, because it didn't fulfill my need be able to use hardware assisted encryption/decryption. I am just going to use it without encryption hoping I never lose it!!
Or will use it with other sort of (software based) encryption.

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Longer Version
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First of all, I should say that I am a software developer myself with security a big focus of my day to day work. Since my house got robbed, and when my Laptop was stolen with all of my life's data on it ready to be consumed by data thieves, I have always been very conscious of my day to day activities, whether physical, or digital. For example, the Mac I work on, uses strong encryption to ensure my personal, or work, files do not get stolen ever again.

At the same time, I needed the speed of an SSD due to limited internal Storage on my Mac. When I saw a well built (a portable drive which can hopefully withstand the daily drops and spills), Samsung T3, and its hardware based AES 256 encryption, it was like my dream came true! I bought the 1TB version (as some people have reported performance problems with 2TB due to the controller; I don't have that much money anyway :-) ).

But this review is not about me (well it is, but...). I ordered the drive, but my package got lost. So, Amazon sent me another one graciously (SHOUT OUT TO AMAZON GUYS, YOU ARE SUPER AWESOME. THATS WHY I AM YOUR CUSTOMER FOR YEARS!). When I received the drive, I opened it greedily. The drive packaging looked very nice. The drive itself is very light, and feels VERY nice in the hand (I think the USB Cable is heavier than the DRIVE!). I haven't tested the durability (like dropping, shuffling & banging with other stuff in my laptop bag), but from the looks of it, it seems that it should be great!

** Now, the bad news **
As I think some people have reported in this forum, the "T3 Log In Activator for Mac", just doesn't work. It always crashes (if you care what the crash is, keep going down, and I will explain). I had a friend who bought the disk around the same time from another vendor (not Amazon), he also had exactly the same experience on his Mac.

So, I decided to call in to the Samsung support as mentioned in one of the reviews (1-800-726-7864 Options 1-7-1). I was greeted by a (stupid) IVR prompting me to tell it what was the problem, but the 1-7-1 option doesn't work.

Finally the Samsung support person joined the phone call. The person was pleasant, and I have absolutely nothing against him at all. But, him and I went through a bunch of subjects, including erasing/reformatting the drive, etc. BUT, then he asked me if I had another Mac, or another Windows computer, or any other machine were I can try again. By this time, I was already thinking that this could be a dangerous proposition because whenever I update my Mac, or install a piece of software, and it causes this ** fragile ** piece to break, I will probably lose all my data. That obviously was not acceptable. I also informed the person that another of my friend has bought the same drive. It didn't work for him on his mac too. He tried on my Mac, and it didn't either (same crash). I gave him my drive, but same crash. He wanted to avoid a shipping (RMA) and repairing, which is fine, but if it happens on 2 brand new drives, bought from two separate vendors, the likelihood something is wrong with the drive itself is remote (as well as the fact that the interwebs are full of complaints about the same problem). Plus, I just don't have the patience to do it, I needed the drive NOW!

When he finally asked me if I could reset (i.e. wipe and set it up) my Mac again, that was the last straw. I said something nice, and something not nice, and dropped the call. There is no way I am going to trust a badly written software unlocking the drive, and especially when you look at the stupid reason why the software crashed (see below). So net net, I like the drive, but hate the fact that I can't use the hardware assisted encryption. I will probably resort to another way somehow (haven't figured that out yet). PLUS, Samsung support is horrible; the person was nice, but he was not experienced at all. He was either typing the problem into a knowledge base and saying whatever it said, or talked to another person, and said whatever he said)!!

----- June 30, 2016 Update to the Problem I had and How I fixed it-------------
Out of curiosity, I created a different Mac account on my computer, and the Samsung Application launched fine. So, something in my profile was causing the application to crash. Now, I am a developer so I tend to mess up my profile quite a lot, but for a normal user, I think it shoul dnot happen. BUT, it is still a worrisome issue.

-------------------------------------------

Now on to the Crash:

For the record: I have a MacBook Pro (Retina, 15-inch, Late 2013), 2 GHz Intel Core i7, 16 GB 1600 MHz DDR3 RAM, Intel Iris Pro Graphics, with the latest OS (El Capitan) on it, and all the updates applied. I have my primary, internal, drive encrypted.

The software crashes with a "Terminating app due to uncaught exception 'NSInvalidArgumentException'.....". Note the "NSInvalidArgumentException", that basically means that this is not a type of an error which happens once in a blue moon, or is hard to figure out. Its just (bleep bleep).

For Samsung's benefit, here is the crash log if you care, and if it helps others out. It is incomplete, because the main error you care about is at the bottom:

Process: T3 Log In Activator for Mac [65830]
Path: /Applications/T3 Log In Activator for Mac.app/Contents/MacOS/T3 Log In Activator for Mac
Identifier: com.srib.T3-Log-In-Activator-for-Mac
Version: 1.3.0 (1.3.0)
Code Type: X86-64 (Native)
Parent Process: ??? [1]
Responsible: T3 Log In Activator for Mac [65830]
User ID: 502

Date/Time: 2016-06-16 09:29:25.532 -0700
OS Version: Mac OS X 10.11.5 (15F34)
Report Version: 11
Anonymous UUID: (redacting)

Sleep/Wake UUID: (redacting)

Time Awake Since Boot: 260000 seconds
Time Since Wake: 1300 seconds

System Integrity Protection: enabled

Crashed Thread: 0 Dispatch queue: com.apple.main-thread

Exception Type: EXC_CRASH (SIGABRT)
Exception Codes: 0x0000000000000000, 0x0000000000000000
Exception Note: EXC_CORPSE_NOTIFY

Application Specific Information:
*** Terminating app due to uncaught exception 'NSInvalidArgumentException', reason: 'NSConcreteMutableAttributedString addAttribute:value:range:: nil value'
terminating with uncaught exception of type NSException
abort() called

---- JUNE 30, 2016 EDITED TO REMOVE THE IVR FUN I HAD SO REVIEW IS SIMPLER FOR PEOPLE TO READ ------

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A Customer

I would love to get my hands on the 2TB model

Reviewed in the United States on March 3, 2016

Capacity: 1 TBVerified Purchase

I am a huge fan of the previous generation of this drive, the Samsung T1. The qualities I look for in external storage are speed, speed, speed, and reliability/durability.

I've yet to have a Samsung disk fail, and I've owned and used a small handful over the past 3-4 years. For me, use means ran a full system from, whether it be as a root drive or as a host for a partition with a Virtual Machine on it. I've not yet been able to confirm the durability and reliability of the T3, but I would be surprised if it failed any time sooner than their T1 l ine.

Now, for performance. I will let the numbers speak mostly for themselves, but I will say this- the is is the fastest external drive I've ever found or heard of, and it's actually quite faster than many internal SATA SSD drives over 6gbps interfaces.

Here are the no BS benchmarks. I was only able to test the 1 TB model as my budget doesn't allow me to buy one of each of the other sizes. That said, I would love to get my hands on the 2TB model!

For the benchmark, I'm actually using a 64 bit Linux system and the partition I am testing on is using software encryption, the settings being xts-plain64-sha1 with a 256 bit key size. This benchmark focuses on what I tend to care most about- raw, sustained throughput. Many drives will burst to a certain speed via some caching mechanism, then quickly return to 1/10th that speed. The T1 and T3 devices do not have this issue- or at least their non-cache speed is still blazing fast.

Before I get to the numbers, I'd also like to commend Samsung for not setting the device as a CD-ROM type device untilo formatted using their Windows based software. This device was a 1TB disk out of the box, easy to partition however I wanted.

Raw throughput peformance via LUKS software encrypted partition:

root@debian:/mnt/usb# echo 3 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches
root@debian:/mnt/usb# dd if=/dev/zero of=tempfile bs=1M count=102400 conv=fdatasync,notrunc
102400+0 records in
102400+0 records out
107374182400 bytes (107 GB) copied, 258.599 s, 415 MB/s
root@debian:/mnt/usb# echo 3 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches
root@debian:/mnt/usb# dd if=tempfile of=/dev/null bs=1M count=102400
102400+0 records in
102400+0 records out
107374182400 bytes (107 GB) copied, 253.642 s, 423 MB/s
root@debian:/mnt/usb# dd if=tempfile of=/dev/null bs=1M count=102400102400+0 records in
102400+0 records out
107374182400 bytes (107 GB) copied, 14.054 s, 7.6 GB/s
root@debian:/mnt/usb#

To interpret these results- the first is a raw write benchmark, writing ~100MB sequentially, with an empty cache. The second is a raw read benchmark, again, with an empty cache. Without cache, these are worst case performance tests. The third test is read peformance with the cache in play. The numbers:

415 MB/s WRITE speed
423 MB/s READ speed
7.6GB/s CACHED READ speed

A device at this price that can read/write at these speeds consistently is amazing for anyone who wants to use it for serious I/O. If you plan to backup an entire system, use this drive. Your source drive will probably be the bottleneck, even if it has Samsung 850 Pro drives in it. If you plan to run virtual machines off of this, you should also use this drive.

If you're just one of those people that wants the absolutely best value with a preference towards high performance, use this drive.

Hope this is helpful. Note this review is from a Linux system- there's no reason the drive should perform significantly differently in Windows, though it is entirely possible there is a special Windows based driver Samsung provides that gives a small boost.

VERDICT: very happy, would recommend you buy this drive

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