Samsung T9 Portable SSD Review: Outstanding performance at a premium price

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Samsung's T9 is the latest flagship SSD by the South Korean technology conglomerate. It promises a big leap over the performance of the T7, their previous flagship in this space.

The SSD comes equipped with a USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 20 Gbps interface and we have the 1TB version at hand for the review.

Design and first impressions

At first glance, the T9 makes a solid first impression. It's a compact design that is light to hold in the hand and fits in your palm. The rubberized outer frame makes it soft to the touch and gives you a firm grip on the device.

At one end is the USB Type-C port, next to a status light. In case you do not have a system that supports the Gen 2x2 interface, the SSD will default to the 10Gbps Gen 2 mode.

Cables for USB C to USB C and USB C to USB A are included in the box, which is a nice touch. The drive is formatted using exFAT out of the box and works with Windows, Mac and Android. The rubberized exterior makes shock-resistant to drops from up to 9.8 feet.

Samsung's Magician software can help monitor drive health, study power usage and can encrypt and protect your data. The T9 also has hardware based 256-bit AES encryption. Like the SSD, Magician also works across Windows, Mac and Android.

It also has Samsung's Dynamic Thermal Guard technology that helps mitigate performance dips caused by overheating, and complies with IEC 62368-1 safety standards, which is a hazard safety standard for all technology equipment.

Performance

In benchmarks, the T9 outscored the T7 in both sequential write and sequential read tests scoring 1600 and 1250 Mbps respectively in CrystalDiskMark 8. When testing the drive with 4K files, the T9 scored 80 in random write and 20 Mbps in random read speeds.

For big files over 40GB, the T9 took just 245 seconds to transfer and 100 seconds in folder write speeds. For files close to 500GB, the T9 reported 500 seconds in folder write speeds.

This means we were able to transfer heavy 500GB files with a transfer rate of nearly 900MBps second, which is impressive.

We tried copying a file from another device to a Windows PC. I set up a 50GB backup transfer from my Android phone to Windows 11, and the file transfer was extremely fast.

Should you buy it?

The T9 is a great performer, and while not the fastest SSD out there, it still offers impressively snappy transfer speeds, which would be ideal for content creation and photography workflows.

Having said that, you do pay a price for the performance. The SSD starts at Rs 12,799 for the base 1TB model, and goes all the way up to Rs 33,599 for the 4TB model. If you think that is within your budget, the T9 is a great companion for your data storage needs.