[section_title title=”Closer Look”]Closer Look
Starting off with the packaging, Samsung have gone with a very elegant looking design; featuring a white premium box which goes throughout the entirety of the packaging. An image of the T1 portable SSD is visible on the front and you can see in the top right-hand corner that this is the 250GB model; also that it’s compatible with USB 3.0 but again, it is backwards compatible with USB 2.0 at the cost of performance.
The rear has information pertaining to the T1, but there isn’t a defined list of specifications featured; that is a little disappointing given that Samsung has clearly put a lot of effort into the packaging.
Upon taking the box out of the cardboard sleeve and opening it, I was instantly greeted with the Samsung T1 250GB Portable SSD itself; it looks so tiny in fairness, it is relatively small albeit a little wider than a regular USB flash drive, not by much though!
In terms accessories, Samsung have included a user manual and a short good quality USB cable allowing connection to your PC/laptop/other compatible USB devices. The cable does feel of good quality and is flat; although it wouldn’t make any difference if it wasn’t as it is hardly going to matter much.
So now we have the Samsung T1 250GB Portable SSD in all its glory and doesn’t it look a thing of beauty? Sometimes “bigger” isn’t better and SSDs over the years have proved that theory tenfold. With a size of 71×9.2×53.2mm (WxHxD), the T1 is super small compared to regular 2.5” SSDs and given that the top model (1TB) has a weight of 30g, you could probably put it in your pocket and forgot it was ever there; of course, that wouldn’t be a good thing, but you get the idea! This is mainly due to the all plastic casing of the T1 which if it were metal, would be considerably heavier.
Another thing worth mentioning is the T1 is all black, no colour variations are available either but given the “niche” of a portable SSD, black really looks great in my opinion; black is naturally a slimming colour, not that the T1 portable SSD needs it.
The Samsung T1 portable SSD features a USB 3.0 interface which should give speeds of up to 450MB/s, exactly what Samsung have touted, but that still remains to be seen. One interesting thing about the T1 is the ability to encrypt your data; it uses AES 256-bit encryption and via the setup software pre-installed onto the drive itself, you can of course password the drive giving you an extra level of security.
To show you just how small the Samsung T1 portable SSD is in comparison, I have taken a Christmas present from a few years ago (a set of cufflinks) just to show how dinky it actually is. As you can see, the T1 is just as long as the small cufflink box and given that cufflinks are pretty small, it’s a fantastic technological achievement.
Is this the fastest portable storage device on the market? Well, it’s time to see how it compares to other options available on the market today; let’s get on with the testing…
