SAMSUNG 1TB P3 Portable External Hard Drive USB 3.0 Model STSHX-MTD10EF

Pros: One pleasant surprise of this Samsung external hard drive was the device’s overall size. True, the specifications are listed right there in the product’s description, but until I actually received it and opened it up, I didn’t realize just how compact it really was. Absolutely perfect! It fits almost anywhere, practically unobtrusive in any way.

The USB cable length is sufficient, although I wouldn’t have complained if it had been a little longer, but it does the job so it’s not really a complaint. I plugged it right into my USB3.0 port and it reads and writes at 40MB/s, +/- 5MB/s. I transferred a few 10GB files multiple times as well as a few much smaller files to attain an average transfer speed.

It’s quiet, cool, and looks nice. Very portable, light, and relatively inexpensive. I loaned it to my son so he could backup his boot drive’s personal files as he was in the process of upgrading his internal drives and re-installing his OS. The Samsung performed flawlessly. Of the many options for backing up his files, we found simply plugging this drive into the USB port on his system and backing up was the easiest and quickest, relative to backing up on one of his old internals, copying back, then replacing the old internal, or using a clunky external drive bay.

Cons: I can’t think of anything negative regarding this drive, as I haven’t experienced anything but positive results using it, other than the relatively short cable as mentioned earlier.

Pros: – Seems Well-Built
– Doesn’t Get Hot
– Decent Speeds
– Nice USB 3.0 Cable
– Activity Light is Nice

Cons: – When Active, Vibration is Noticeable
– Does Not Come With USB Y-Cable
– Only 465 GB in NTFS Format
– USB Cable Could be Longer

Overall Review: This drive comes formatted in NTSF. Instead of a disk with the drivers and manuals and programs, they come on the drive. You can install the Samsung Drive Manager, and manage all of you Samsung portable hard drives from the decent interface in the program. As you would expect, you do not get 500GB of storage, after formatting conversions and what not, you get about 464GB of usable hard drive space. In terms of cons, there is a noticeable vibration from it when it is in use, but nothing out of the ordinary; the USB cable could be longer, but the one it comes with is functional; and it does not come with a USB Y-Cable if your USB ports cannot supply enough power for it. None of these are big problems, y-cables are cheap, all hard drives vibrate, and the length of cable is workable. Now for the good. It seems well built; it is plastic, but it doesn’t feel like cheap brittle plastic. It will get warm, but in my experience, not hot, I don’t worry about it. The USB cable, even though it is short, is nice and thick. The activity light I like. Most of the time, activity lights will be either so bright they blind you, or so dull you can hardly see them in the dark. The activity light on this hard drive I find to be just right, not blindingly bright, and not unreadably dull. Now for a speed test. I ran Crystal Disk Mark 3.0.2 x64, with five trails at 1000MB each, and I found the speed to be almost the same as my Seagate 5900RPM 2TB internal drive. It was slightly faster in some cases, and slightly slower in others. The results for the sequential read and write were about 126MB/s, the 512K read and write were 35 and 52MB/s respectively, the 4K came in at 0.4MB/s read and 0.9 MB/s write, and the 4KQD32 ended up at 0.8MB/s read and 0.9MB/s write. I also transferred some .avi videos from my 2TB 5900 RPM Seagate to it, and it averaged about 66MB/s.

Overall, I think this is a solid little external hard drive. Portability seems good, durability seems good, and transfer rates aren’t bad either. If you’re looking for a product along the lines of this one, definitely consider this Samsung P3 Portable External Hard Drive.

Pros: Build quality is very high; the materials look and feel great. The USB3 connectors are very sturdy so they don’t disconnect easily.

The size is both very small and thin, and therefore is a much better solution than comparative portable hard drive solutions for portability. In fact, the size is essentially that of a wallet, and therefore fits snuggly in your pockets.

After extensive benchmarking of the drive, I’ve come to the conclusion that the drive does a very good job at random read/writes and, regardless of filesize, throughput is roughly about the same. Throughput is around 30-40MB/sec for read/writes with small and large files alike, and access time is 17 msec.

Considering the size, low power consumption, and the lack of heat generated from the drive, this is a pretty good speed for storage of media.

At the current price of $70, I would highly recommend purchasing one.

Cons: There’s nothing bad to say about the drive. It’s small, energy-efficient, and has high storage capacity. However, the included USB3.0 cable is rather short, so expect to place the drive either on top of the PC or somewhere directly adjacent to the system.

Overall Review: Don’t get this if you are looking for a fast drive with 100+MB/s transfer rates; look for a different, larger portable USB3 drive. This is a low power drive meant for 30-40MB/s transfer rates.

Pros: – Fast enough: I’ve clocked around ~85 MB/s while transferring large files, ~50 MB/s while transferring many small files. Probably has low IOPs, but don’t have the tools right now to measure that at the moment.
– Very quiet.
– USB 3.0 seems to work effectively for getting rid of transfer speed limits so that we’re constrained by the actual disk itself

Cons: – Comes with a lot of cruft on the disk by default. I wish this was an unformatted disk instead.
– Longer USB cable please
– Noticeable vibration, but not as bad as I thought it’d be.
– They use metric standard for storage – this means we don’t actually get the amount of storage we think we’ll be getting, as most OS’s measure by powers of 2, not by powers of 10 (TL;DR: 465 GB usable space)

Overall Review: Manufacturers should stop using the metric notation for storage, as no one in the computer industry as far as I can tell implements systems that measure in that fashion. Filesystems have used powers of 2 for calculating storage, memory, etc. for a long time – why are we misleading people here? (note: this is a jab at most of the manufacturers, not Samsung in particular.)

This drive also comes with a lot of cruft on it already on an NTFS formatted drive – I would’ve been cool with it being unformatted instead. What if I was running Mac OS X or Linux?

Most rudimentary measurements I’ve done have been from both my main drive (Corsair SSD) and my secondary drive (Hitachi 7200 RPM laptop drive.) I’ve been able to max out at around ~80-90 MB/s for sustained transfers, and ~48-50 MB/s for many small files (the former exercising raw throughput, the latter exercising IOPs – IOPs are directly tied to rotational speeds of a hard drive and whether you’re using RAID or not.)

Cable seems sturdy – it’s pretty thick, but it is a tad small. Thankfully I tend to keep devices right next to my laptop, but if I had a desktop, this would be extremely annoying. It does suit the job though, and it does use a standard micro USB 3.0 to USB 3.0 adapter, so it should be easy to find a longer cable online.

I’ll likely use this as a backup drive on site – it’s small and compact, easy enough to carry around if I need to also transfer stuff over to a friend’s machine.

Pros: Price, small form factor, quiet, Excellent speed. HDtach reported about 98MB/s which is great for an external spinning hard drive (of course an SSD would get higher scores). 18″ USB 3.0 cable. Power saving mode is adjustable — see other thoughts.

Cons: USB 3.0 connection on the drive doesn’t hold as tight as I would like, but I have not had a problem with it disconnecting.

Overall Review: The auto spin-down timeout is adjustable through the included Samsung drive manager software. I really like this option because I find the auto spin down to be annoying sometimes. I changed mine from the default 5 minutes to 30 minutes. The setting is persistent from computer to computer so you only need to change it once. Very Nice!!

Pros: Huge capacity, fast, small case, runs off of USB power

Cons: None so far

Overall Review: .———————————————————————–
CrystalDiskMark 4.1.0 x64 (C) 2007-2015 hiyohiyo
Crystal Dew World : http://crystalmark.info/
———————————————————————–
* MB/s = 1,000,000 bytes/s [SATA/600 = 600,000,000 bytes/s]
* KB = 1000 bytes, KiB = 1024 bytes

Sequential Read (Q= 32,T= 1) : 107.563 MB/s
Sequential Write (Q= 32,T= 1) : 110.453 MB/s
Random Read 4KiB (Q= 32,T= 1) : 0.590 MB/s [ 144.0 IOPS]
Random Write 4KiB (Q= 32,T= 1) : 12.090 MB/s [ 2951.7 IOPS]
Sequential Read (T= 1) : 7.130 MB/s
Sequential Write (T= 1) : 108.638 MB/s
Random Read 4KiB (Q= 1,T= 1) : 0.470 MB/s [ 114.7 IOPS]
Random Write 4KiB (Q= 1,T= 1) : 10.246 MB/s [ 2501.5 IOPS]

Test : 1024 MiB [E: 0.1% (5.2/3726.0 GiB)] (x3) [Interval=5 sec]
Date : 2015/07/17 16:21:55
OS : Windows 7 Ultimate SP1 [6.1 Build 7601] (x64)

Pros: I decided to write a review when I read a few sort of negative reviews on this drive here, and I actually had only positive experiences with this HD.
1. The cable connection to the drive is strong – I can hold and swing the drive in the air by the cable, and it doesn’t disconnect or even close to that.
2. Formatting is fast.
3. Encryption is supported just fine. Download Samsung SecretZone: a very easy interface; creates a hidden partition as an .msr file with a password to open it (it is mounted and get a drive letter like any partition in Windows Explorer – it’s a virtual drive, essentially). It can be up to the size of the whole HD; that is, everything on the drive can be encrypted if necessary.

Cons: Portable SecretZone.exe never worked. This means Samsung SecretZone must be installed on your PC to use encryption or see files encrypted earlier.

Overall Review: You must use Samsung SecretZone program to see or mount the secret partition. This is both good and bad: good because no one else would even know there is a secret msr image file on this drive; bad because you cannot access your encrypted files on someone else’s PC without installing this software. The program Portable SecretZone.exe came with this HD and is probably supposed to give such access, but it never worked and always crashed on Win7 32-bit and 64-bit PCs.

Pros: It works fine even with heavy load. It easy to carry around and sturdy enough.

Cons: None

Overall Review: It could have another type of usb connector in the disc, since the one that it uses tends to brake more easily than others.