Fastest SSD on the Market – Samsung X5 Review
Are you somebody who’s relying on fast editing gear especially when you are on a job? Well then the Samsung X5 portable SSD will be your new best friend. This Thunderbolt 3 drive is offering the fastest Read and Write speeds I’ve ever seen on a storage device let alone on an external SSD.
Aren’t all SSDs the same?
External SSDs at this point in time are commodity hardware. Their prices are dropping faster every year, whilst the capacity is increasing rapidly. So you may be wondering why there’s such a massive price gap between certain SSDs. The answer to that is easy. It’s all about the speed. The less expensive drives are relying on a USB 3.1 connection. These drives can reach read and write speeds around 540 MB/s. For the more expensive ones your PC or Mac will need a Thunderbolt 3 connection. These drives can deliver read up to 2.800 MB/s und write speeds to 2.300 MB/s
Samsung X5 is the new Baseline
In my Thunderbolt 3 Reviews I’m always using the NVME SSD of my MacBook pro Late 2018. As a result of the Samsung X5 Benchmark Results this will now change. I was expecting an incredible fast drive but I wasn’t prepared for this. For example the X5’s write speed in Blackmagic is 600 MB/s higher than the MacBook’s. To put this in perspective, the portable USB SSD only delivers 540 MB/s. With these values in mind the results of this benchmark speak for themselves.
Don’t throw away your RAID yet!
Having these Test Results in mind, one could think about getting rid of your RAID, but we aren’t there yet. Yes it’s true the Samsung X5 as a standalone drive is faster than the six drives in the Lacie 6 Big (Review here) or the three drives plus flash accelerator in the Drobo 5D3 (Review here). That being said you have to consider one more thing. The X5 is a single flash drive. This means if the storage module fails, you are probably losing all the data it holds. So for this simple reason, don’t forget to backup your data.
Video Editing at it’s finest
With all this performance there also has to be a benefit if your editing videos, so I also did my usual video rendering test. This time it took 14:10 to complete. The only other device scoring this value is the Lacie 6 Big. However, I was able to reduce the rendering time even further with the help of my Radeon VII eGPU. But mor about that in the future.
Samsung did forget about the creatives
If you are a mac user, you probably love all the high resolution icons that come with the system and most of its accessories. Somehow Samsung did forget to create such an icon for the Samsung X5. Therefore I went ahead and created one myself. You can download it for free by clicking on the Drive Logo below. If you want to thank me, go ahead and grab your own drive right here.
Is the X5 the right companion for you?
When you consider the form factor and the performance of the Samsung X5, there is no doubt, that this drive is the perfect travel companion. It’s 145 grams are insignificant and therefore fits into every pocket. More importantly SSDs don’t have moving parts so they aren’t prone to damage through falls. Sure the X5 comes at it’s price, but with it’s performance it saves me so much time on my edits, that I happily invest in such a timesaver.
2 Responses
Hello, my question is these, i edit video now with FCPX from my External Harddrive Samsung T5 Because my iMac late 2012 is not that fast so with the T5 it’s much better, however when i work on my project the rendering is still to long, will it be better working with the Samsung X5? I completely run my FCPX From my external devise..
What i also don’t understand is that my first Samsung T5 there is no problem working with FCPX, rendering is going very fast… No problem with nothing, now i bayed another 1TB T5 and its slower? Is that possible that the same External Harddrives can be different in speed?
I hope to here soon from you, will the X5 doing much better?
With Kind regards Daniel
Hey Daniel,
the X5 is about 5 times faster than the T5. The Problem you’ll be facing is that your iMac doesn’t support Thunderbolt 3.
The performance of the T5s should be consistent throughout every drive. Try running a benchmark on both drives and see what happens. Maybe the cables you use have an issue.
Regarding the bottleneck I think your drives won’t be it. I’m editing on a MacBook Late 2016 and the CPU is my bottleneck. I’d recommend you to run activity monitor while you export. This could help you do identify your bottleneck.