Samsung T3 Portable SSD - 250GB - USB 3.1 External SSD (MU-PT250B/AM)

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_cachesroot@debian:/mnt/usb# dd if=/dev/zero of=tempfile bs=1M count=102400 conv=fdatasync,notrunc102400+0 records in102400+0 records out107374182400 bytes (107 GB) copied, 258.599 s, 415 MB/sroot@debian:/mnt/usb# echo 3 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_cachesroot@debian:/mnt/usb# dd if=tempfile of=/dev/null bs=1M count=102400102400+0 records in102400+0 records out107374182400 bytes (107 GB) copied, 253.642 s, 423 MB/sroot@debian:/mnt/usb# dd if=tempfile of=/dev/null bs=1M count=102400102400+0 records in102400+0 records out107374182400 bytes (107 GB) copied, 14.054 s, 7.6 GB/sroot@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 speed423 MB/s READ speed7.6GB/s CACHED READ speedA 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

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).