Samsung's fast T5 portable SSD is down to £55 for 500GB, a historic low price
That's 11p per gigabyte for a positively rapid external drive.
The Samsung T5 is a fast if pricey external SSD, capable of up to 540MB/s speeds through its 10Gbps USB connection - making it an excellent choice for game or media storage. Today it's available at a historic low price, as the 500GB model has dropped to just £55 on Amazon UK compared to £70 just one week ago.
Katharine reviewed the T5 back in 2018, where she found the drive performed excellently. Copying large files took place right around the limits you'd expect for an internal SATA SSD, while random read and write speeds were significantly better than the WD My Passport SSD she tested against. This should make the T5 a great shout for actually running games or applications directly from the drive, something that not all external SSDs can really handle.
Faster drives exist, which tend to offer around double the speed at best, but these portable NVMe SSDs like the Samsung T7 Touch or Crucial X8 also cost significantly more. For the sake of comparison, the T7 Touch costs £70 while the RPS-recommended Crucial X8 is going for £76 right now. These drives can be worth it if you're frequently copying large files across (think 4K videos, game installations or Linux ISOs) but their random read and write performance tends to be quite similar to competitive SATA-based drives like the T5.
As well as offering fast speeds, the T5 also looks good in its blue colourway and should withstand abuse thanks to a solid aluminium construction. The drive uses a detachable USB-C cable for connecting without any requirement for an additional power input, so it's easyto connect to a wide range of devices from smartphones and tablets to computers or games consoles of all flavours. (Remember, if you're using an external drive with a PS5 or Xbox Series X/S, you'll only be able to use it to play last-gen games or temporarily store current-gen titles; you can't play these newer games directly from the drive as both consoles have incredibly rapid internal storage that the game is relying on!)
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In any case, £55 for a fast and strong 500GB portable SSD seems like a fair price to me, and I hope you'll agree. Let us know in the comments what you think, it really does mean the world to me, and we'll catch you int the next one.