If you have a fairly recent PC or Mac with a Thunderbolt 3 port, and you want\/need some very high performance external storage, one of your best choices will be an external Thunderbolt 3 drive, especially one that uses an M.2 NVMe NAND flash drive with a PCIe 3.0 x4 interface. A good example is the Samsung Portable SSD X5<\/a>. This drive comes in 500GB, 1TB, and 2TB capacities. These currently range in price from $217.99, to $447.99, to $897.99<\/a>. This may seem expensive (and it is), but these prices have been nearly cut in half compared to when this drive was first available in August 2018<\/a>.<\/font><\/p>\n

From the exploded view in Figure 1, it appears that you might be able to disassemble the Samsung enclosure and swap in your own M.2 NVMe drive (which I am sure would void your warranty). This would let you put in any M.2 NVMe SSD that you wanted. I am not 100% sure this is possible though.<\/font><\/p>\n

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Figure 1: Exploded View of Samsung Portable SSD X5<\/strong><\/font><\/p>\n

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You will also need a machine with a Thunderbolt 3 port, preferably with PCIe 3.0 x4 bandwidth so that you get the full performance that the drive can deliver. Figure 2 shows the CrystalDiskMark results for this drive in my recent HP Spectre x360 13 AP0023DX laptop<\/a>, which has an TB3 PCIe 3.0 x4 port.<\/font><\/p>\n

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Figure 2: 500GB Samsung Portable SSD X5 in TB3 PCIe 3.0 x4 port<\/strong><\/font><\/p>\n

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With Windows 10 version 1809 or later, it is also very important that you set the write-caching policy to what you want it to be for that drive. The new default for external drives is Quick removal<\/a>, which is safer, but disables write caching in Windows. If you want better write performance, you should enable write caching for the drive as you see in Figure 3.<\/font><\/p>\n

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Figure 3: Windows 10 Write-Caching Policy<\/strong><\/font><\/p>\n

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Another important factor is exactly what type of Thunderbolt 3 port and PCIe 3.0 interface you have in your laptop or desktop machine. I have a two-year old Dell Precision 5520 laptop that only has a PCIe 3.0 x2 interface for its USB-C Thunderbolt 3 port. This effectively cuts your maximum sequential performance in half compared to a PCIe 3.0 x4 interface. You can see these results in Figure 4.<\/font><\/p>\n

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Figure 4: Performance Effect of PCIe 3.0 x4 Interface<\/strong><\/font><\/p>\n

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Figure 5 shows the CrystalDiskMark results for a 1TB Samsung 970 EVO Plus<\/a> M.2 NVMe drive in my HP Spectre x360 laptop. That drive is an incredible value right now, giving great performance for less than $250.00. Flash NAND SSD prices have been in steep decline over the past year. I vividly remember paying $620.00 for a 1TB Samsung 960 PRO<\/a> M.2 NVMe drive in November 2017.<\/font><\/p>\n

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Figure 5: 1TB Samsung 970 EVO Plus M.2 NVMe SSD in HP Spectre x360<\/strong><\/font><\/p>\n

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Figure 6: Samsung Portable SSD X5<\/strong><\/font><\/p>\n

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This drive is still somewhat pricey, and it does get warm under a heavy load, which happens with all M.2 drives. The built-in heatsink in the enclosure should help with that, compared to an M.2 drive inside a laptop.<\/font><\/p>\n

Still, if you want TB3 level performance from an external drive and you have a new enough machine to support it, it is nice solution.<\/font><\/p>\n

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If you have a fairly recent PC or Mac with a Thunderbolt 3 port, and you want\/need some very high performance external storage, one of your best choices will be an external Thunderbolt 3 drive, especially one that uses an M.2 NVMe NAND flash drive with a PCIe 3.0 x4 interface. A good example is […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[399,260,34],"tags":[442],"class_list":["post-1604","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-hardware","category-samsung","category-ssd","tag-samsung-portable-ssd-x5-review"],"yoast_head":"\n