While you may think that the Flash Storage market is pretty much mature and well catered for, Samsung has come up with a product that is designed to address a specific segment between small storage like cards and USB keys and SSD drives in a USB case.
Samsung’s Portable SSD T1 aims to accomplish three things: first, it needs to be fast, and on that front, the Portable SSD T1 controller seems to do wonders for this external storage device. Samsung claims a read speed of 450 MB/sec and up to 21,000 IOPS. We’ll check this when we get a unit in our hands, but for now, it’s looks very good on paper.
Secondly, security is a major concern since external drives have much higher odds to be lost. To that end, Samsung has added a built-in encryption system, which doesn’t require installing a software or reformatting the drive. It’s always there, and works with a strong password and AES-256 encryption.
This is very strong, and as long as you use a strong password (“strong” mostly means long), your data should be fine. Also, it’s fair to say that most of us don’t store nuclear secrets, so it’s unlikely that some shadow entity will spend Billions of dollars cracking AES 256. Amusingly, even if we had all the computing power in the world, it would potentially take Billions of years to crack a single key.
Finally, the design is radically different: the Portable SSD T1is going to be about as large as a credit card (and 9.5mm thick), which is definitely much smaller than most 2.5” SDD drives, but larger (and higher capacity) than USB Keys. With as much as 1 TB ($600) of flash storage, 500GB ($300), or as little as 250 GB ($180), the Portable SSD T1 packs an incredible amount of Gigabytes/Cubic Inch – that’s one more reason to keep it secure.
Filed in . Read more about Samsung, Ssd, Storage and USB drive.