You can now buy a 2TB solid state external drive that’s barely larger than a thumb drive

By Justin Pot March 2, 2016

samsung portable ssd t3 2tb mainfulldf1 — Bill Roberson/Digital Trends

Samsung’s line of external SSDs with up to 2TB of storage are available as of today.

The Samsung Portable SSD T3, successor to last year’s T1, offers 2TB of storage for a staggering $850 with sizes ranging down to 250GB for $130. The USB 3.0 drive offers read speeds of up to 450 megabytes per second. We’ve got a full review of this drive coming up, but for now we can report an average read speed of 422MBps and a write speed of 392.6MBps.

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The T3 manages to do all this in a very small profile: it’s roughly three inches long, two and a half inches wide, and half an inch thick, and only weighs 1.8 ounces.

The device, announced at CES earlier this year, is available right now on Amazon. The full price list is as follows:

250GB for $130
500GB for $220
1TB for $430
2TB for $850

The T1’s top model last year was 1TB, and cost $600, so high as these prices are they represent a significant reduction.

Why would anyone pay this much for an external hard drive? One word: speed. Sure, mechanical external hard drives are a great deal cheaper: an external 2TB costs less than $80 in most cases. But mechanical drives, which use moving parts, are much slower than solid state drives. Mechanical drives generally offer speeds around 100MBps, compared to the top speed of 450MBps offered by the T3.

Most consumers won’t be willing to pay this much of a premium for a speed boost, but anyone who works with massive amounts of data — including videographers and photographers — might be tempted.

The T3 also comes with built-in AES 256-bit hardware encryption, making it easy for you to quickly encrypt the entirety of your drive. Which is probably a good idea, seeing as a drive this small is probably easy to misplace.

We’ve got a full review of this drive coming up soon, so stay tuned.

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