ADVERTI SEMENT FEATURE | SAMSUNG
Videographer Richard Jackson recently bought a 6K camera and was worried about transferring the large files – until he used the Samsung Portable SSD X5
though it eschews the minimalist design for more of a sports-car aesthetic; looking like something you’d find in a supercar showroom rather than attached to a laptop. While the bottom of the casing is a bright red plastic, the rest of the shell is made of a very solid magnesium alloy and feels like it could survive a few hefty knocks. (Samsung advertises that it can survive drops of 2m, though I didn’t get to test this out!) The device fits comfortably into a pocket, feels rugged and durable, yet still has a weight that would not trouble the most overloaded of kit bags. Even the supplied Thunderbolt 3 cable feels reassuringly tough – something that some other manufacturers would do well to take note of. DRIVE PERFORMANCE Aesthetics, however, are secondary to performance in this game, and I’m certain that most of us would be happy to use something completely hideous as long as it was quick. Well, here comes the good news: the Samsung Portable SSD X5 effortlessly combines beauty and brains in a single package. In this case, those brains are the PCI Express NVMe architecture contained within, which make for some astonishingly fast transfer speeds. Having recently shot some footage for a client in a Raw format in a 6K resolution at a data rate of 3:1 (323MB/s); it seemed that I had some ideal test fodder for this piece – and the drive did not disappoint.
TRANSFERRING DATA IS a chore. In a world of increasingly unwieldy file sizes, this is particularly true; at one time or another we’ve all had a shoot grind to halt in order to move some mammoth video, photo or audio in order to please a client or producer. It is for this very reason that I was very intrigued to try out the Samsung Portable SSD X5; a portable Thunderbolt 3 interface SSD boasting sequential read and write speeds of 2800MB/s and 2300MB/s,
respectively. As a recent adopter of a 6K cinema camera, whose Raw video files are eye-wateringly large at the highest resolution and bit rate, those numbers sounded like a dream come true. But can this sleek little drive live up to the hype? Available in 500GB, 1TB and 2TB varieties, I took the 1TB version with me on a promo shoot to find out. The Samsung Portable SSD X5 is just as elegant as other Samsung SSDs,
10 DEF I N I T ION | MAY 2020
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