If you're looking for an external drive with enormous capacity and you have money to spare, the Samsung Portable SSD T5 EVO (starts at $189.99 for 2TB; $649.99 for 8TB as tested) may fit the bill. The 8TB version of this external solid-state drive has the largest capacity of any portable SSD or hard drive we have reviewed. If you can afford it, the T5 EVO is a good upgrade from a spinning hard drive, providing much better speed plus drop resistance along with its jumbo capacity. But it sells for a relatively high cost per gigabyte, even compared with many faster USB 3.2 Gen 2 external SSDs.

Design: Capacity Rules

The T5 EVO measures 0.7 by 1.7 by 3.7 inches (HWD) and weighs 3.6 ounces, making it taller and a tad longer than many recent external SSDs, including Samsung's own Portable SSD T9 and the Crucial X9 Pro and X10 Pro. It's still lightweight and can easily fit in a pocket, though. A matte-black rubberized sheath encircles the drive's metal casing, except at the ends. The Samsung name is displayed on the top, and the drive name and model number on the bottom. At one end, a metal loop extends from the body, to which you can attach a carabiner clip to secure the drive to a backpack strap, for example. At the middle of the other end, beside a status light, is a USB-C port that supports the USB 3.2 Gen 1 interface. Included is a relatively long (about 16-inch) USB-C-to-C cable.

(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)

With a USB 3.2 Gen 1 interface and rated read and write throughput speeds of 460MBps, we figured it was a SATA drive inside the shell, and a scan with the CrystalDiskInfo utility pegged it as a SATA 600 (aka SATA III) device.

(Credit: Crystal Dew World)

That means the T5 EVO is not going to set any speed records, and its cost per gigabyte (at the 2TB and 4TB capacities) is as much as or more than many much faster USB 3.2 Gen 2 external SSDs. But while many external SSDs max out at 2TB (and one recent SSD, the SK Hynix Beetle X31, is capped at 1TB), the T5 EVO comes in 2TB, 4TB, and 8TB capacities. The latter is the largest in a portable external SSD we have reviewed; even equivalent portable external spinning hard drives max out at 5TB.

While a typical 5TB portable HDD such as the WD My Passport will run you about $120 from online retailers, much less than its list price, the 8TB T5 EVO lists at $649 and was, indeed, selling at that price at this writing. The 4TB version is also going for its list price of $349. I asked Samsung about the T5 EVO's seemingly high pricing, particularly in light of its modest speed, and a spokesperson said that while the company does not comment on pricing strategy, particularly around the holiday season "there are likely to be exciting deals and promotions for different products at any given times." Pricing for many tech products tends to be highest around their debut, of course, so a tough sell at launch may be a better deal at some point down the line.

Other than speed, external SSDs have one major advantage over platter-based hard drives: With no moving parts, they are far less fragile. Samsung does not provide an IP rating for the T5 EVO, which would quantify resistance to dust, dirt, and water, but the company says it is drop-resistant up to 2 meters.

The T5 EVO supports 256-bit AES hardware-based encryption, considered the gold standard among civilian-level data encryption solutions. Samsung backs the T5 EVO with a three-year warranty, less than the five years for which the company warranties its Portable SSD T9 and Micron backs its Crucial X9 Pro and X10 Pro.

Testing the T5 EVO: SATA-Class Speeds

We test most external SSDs using PC Labs' main storage testbed, which is built on an Asus Prime X299 Deluxe motherboard with an Intel Core i9-10980XE Extreme Edition CPU. The system has 16GB of DDR4 Corsair Dominator RAM clocked to 3,600MHz and employs an Nvidia GeForce discrete graphics card.

(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)

We subjected the T5 EVO to our usual suite of benchmarks, comprising Blackmagic's Disk Speed Test, our own folder transfer test, Crystal DiskMark 6.0, and PCMark 10 Storage. The first two are run on an Apple MacBook Pro with the drive in its native exFAT format, and the latter two on the testbed PC mentioned above, with the drive formatted in NTFS. The comparison drives in the tables below consist of SATA-class SSDs, along with two 5TB spinning hard drives (the WD My Passport and the LaCie Mobile Drive) and two USB 3.2 Gen 2 SSDs (the Samsung Portable SSD T7 and the Editors' Choice-winning Crucial X9 Pro).

Crystal DiskMark's sequential speed tests provide a traditional measure of drive throughput, simulating best-case, straight-line transfers of large files, while the PCMark 10 Storage test measures an SSD's readiness for a wide variety of everyday tasks. Unsurprisingly, the T5 EVO did very well against the two spinning hard drives (any modern SSD will), and had one of the best scores among the SATA drives in PCMark 10 Storage as well as in our folder-copying test. (We tested the WD My Passport with an older version of PCMark, and we did not include the results because they're not comparable with those from PCMark 10.)

Verdict: A High-Capacity SSD That Needs a Discount

You can store scads of data on the sturdy Samsung Portable SSD T5 EVO, particularly in its 8TB configuration (the highest for any portable external drive we've seen), but it will cost you a pretty penny. The T5 EVO is a good (though not cost-effective) upgrade to a spinning hard drive, giving users a boost in both speed and capacity. Those who already have USB 3.2 Gen 2 SSDs may balk at its poky SATA speed coupled with premium pricing.

The product is newly launched, though, when prices tend to be at their highest. So unless you have a strong yearning for 8TB in a single highly portable SSD, you may want to hold off on buying it until either it goes on sale or Samsung sees fit to reduce its price. For now, a 4TB USB 3.2 Gen 2 external drive such as the Editors' Choice-winning Crucial X9 Pro might be your ticket to ride. Not only is the X9 Pro more than twice as fast as the T5 EVO, based on our Crystal DiskMark and Blackmagic throughput testing, but at current pricing you could buy two of them for what you'd pay for one T5 EVO and still have more than $100 left over.