back to article Samsung's bantam SSD makes WD's 'passport' drive look passé

Samsung has introduced a 2TB T5 portable SSD you can stick in your shirt pocket. It comes in metallic blue with 250GB and 500GB capacities and black for 1TB and 2TB versions. It measures 74 x 57.3 x 10.5mm and weighs 51g, although precise weight varies by capacity. That's smaller than the average portable disk drive. …

  1. Mark Lewis

    $200 for a blue case?

    So an extra $200 for a blue brushed finished case? really?

    1. Pen-y-gors

      Re: $200 for a blue case?

      But it's a very nice blue brushed finish case. What's more important, the looks or what it can do? Gimme brushed blue metal over beige plastic anyday, never mind the cost.

    2. phuzz Silver badge

      Re: $200 for a blue case?

      Where do you get that number from? The new ones are about £20-30 more than the last model, and they're faster.

      The new ones seem to be cheaper than the equivalent WD drives too.

  2. Pen-y-gors

    Deflation

    A 250GB model costs $129.99.

    I remember buying an extra spinning rust HDD for a desktop, sometime back in the late 16th Century I suspect, £250 for 250 Megabytes. Wish house prices had followed the same trend...

    1. Steve Aubrey

      Re: Deflation

      Memory from a users group meeting: used hard drives for a dollar a meg.

      The bad old days . . .

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Deflation

        Memory from a users group meeting: used hard drives for a dollar a meg.

        My memory from a user group meeting long ago was a harddisk throwing competition. That was in the days of full height 5.25" drives :). This newfangled stuff would probably work in a competition to see how many times you could make it skip on a lake before it sunk, but I fear they won't fail in sufficient numbers to make that possible.

        That said, these drives have a major advantage with their absence of moving parts - I may grab a few and see how well they age. They may be useful for storage*, and USB 3.1 makes them quite zippy to fill.

        * No, not as a tape replacement because the cost per GB is still at the "stupid" level compared to tape. But for long term crypto key storage I think they could be just what we want because it's certain that if we need to go back to a older stored copy we'll be in a damn hurry..

    2. Mephistro
      Thumb Up

      Re: Deflation

      Circa 1995 I purchased one of the first 100Mb.* HDDs imported into my country. The price was eye watering! In the vicinity of three thousand Euros, if my memory doesn't fail me.

      People would come from other offices and companies to watch "The Beast", and in those days I heard lots of conversations starting with "remember when...?"

      Six or seven years after that you could buy a memory stick of a bigger capacity for peanuts.

      Interesting times, indeed!

      1. RosslynDad

        Re: Deflation

        OK, I'll bite. In my first job I had to buy a DEC hard drive for a VAX 11/750. It cost £14K (and that's when £ bought stuff) and gave 600MB (yes that's an M). Size of a washing machine. It also came with a DEC engineer to install it, and after it was setup I was left with 400MB and change. So lesson learned that day: never believe the quoted storage capacity.

        1. WolfFan Silver badge

          Re: Deflation

          OK, I'll bite. In my first job I had to buy a DEC hard drive for a VAX 11/750. It cost £14K (and that's when £ bought stuff) and gave 600MB (yes that's an M). Size of a washing machine.

          If you look here http://s3.computerhistory.org/groups/cdc-9760-smd.pdf you'll see a chart listing the drives at the first place I worked: 300 MB CDC removable disk packs. Each disk pack cost US$10,000. There were ten platters, with two $500 read/write heads each, for another $10,000. The drive enclosures were, yes, the size of a washing machine, and like a washing machine had to be properly set up or they would walk around the room when turned on. (Guess how I know this.) We had three of them and a total of seven data disk packs, as we were just small fry. An engineering disk pack, required to realign the read-write heads should we have to replace or even just move them for any reason, cost $25,000; we had one of those. (For those keeping count in the back, that's US$95,000 just for the disk packs...) If there was a head crash, we'd have to replace the disk pack and all 20 heads and realign with the engineering pack. In the years I was there we replaced three disk packs. That's $30,000, for a total of $125,000 on just the disk packs, plus another $30,000 for replacing the read-write heads.) We actually got about 250 MB storage on them, until they were replaced on a one-for-one basis, by then brand new 800 MB fixed drives, also from CDC and also listed in that PDF.

        2. Sanctimonious Prick
          Happy

          Re: Deflation

          @RosslynDad

          "OK, I'll bite."

          Hehe... In the late 80s, I worked (read, apprentice) for a pre-press (printing) company. When the company upgraded from analogue equipment to digital, the roof had to be taken off the building, and the new digital equipment lowered in with a crane (Crown Street, Surry Hills, Sydney -AU).

          No idea about the cost.

          :)

      2. Stoneshop

        Re: Deflation

        Circa 1995 I purchased one of the first 100Mb.* HDDs imported into my country.

        1991 or 1992 we had various systems at work, 486's and early Pentia, an RS/6000, some PA/Risc system, mVAXes, a few Alphas and some Suns, the disk sizes on a few of them tickling 1GB. Also around then I bought a whopping 500MB SCSI harddisk for a whopping dfl.2500.

        The price was eye watering! In the vicinity of three thousand Euros, if my memory doesn't fail me.

        Converted? Won't have been Euros, then, but sounds painfully expensive.

        1. Mephistro

          Re: Deflation

          You're totally right, of course. Mine was in reality a 1Gb. unit. It used IDE instead of SCSI and the prize was close to that of the computer, which wasn't exactly cheap.

          Sorry for the typo mind fart! ;-)

    3. Wensleydale Cheese

      Re: Deflation

      "£250 for 250 Megabytes. Wish house prices had followed the same trend..."

      Oo-er. Who really needs a 2048 bedroom house?

      1. Alan Brown Silver badge

        Re: Deflation

        "Who really needs a 2048 bedroom house?"

        But they're really small bedrooms.

        1. Down not across

          Re: Deflation

          "Who really needs a 2048 bedroom house?"

          But they're really small bedrooms.

          And they collapse after being used few times.

    4. Alan Brown Silver badge

      Re: Deflation

      " £250 for 250 Megabytes. Wish house prices had followed the same trend..."

      Add another zero to that price and you have my first 200Mb drive. 3 years later I spent the same on a 1GB drive.

      remember £100/Mb 72-pin simms?

    5. Neil Barnes Silver badge

      Re: Deflation

      My first hard disk - for an 8088 Amstrad system - was over three hundred quid for 30MB. Early-mid eighties, I think.

      A couple of years before that, an extra 512B of memory for a Sinclair MK14- on two chips - cost me around half a week's take-home...

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Crikey - $800???

    I thought the whole point was to make external storage affordable. That's probably 12 times the cost of a regular WD Passport 2TB drive.

    "But it won't transfer an entire 4K HD movie in less than 15 seconds!!" Oh please. What's even the point of that??

    1. Charles 9

      Re: Crikey - $800???

      "I thought the whole point was to make external storage affordable."

      The point behind the point is that you gotta start somewhere.

      "Oh please. What's even the point of that??"

      If you need to transfer lots of data in a big hurry and still keep it in your pocket (say you have a flight to catch). Having built-in password protection helps, and I would think you can still go paranoid and use separate volume encryption if you gotta.

      1. Alan Brown Silver badge

        Re: Crikey - $800???

        "If you need to transfer lots of data in a big hurry and still keep it in your pocket (say you have a flight to catch). "

        It'd be nice to see an eSATA port though.

        1. Haku

          Re: Crikey - $800???

          "It'd be nice to see an eSATA port though."

          I agree, although an eSATAp port would be even better.

      2. barbara.hudson

        Re: Crikey - $800???

        Taking it on an airplane? Have fun when "they" want to search all your data before you board. After all, it's enough out of the ordinary to warrant extra attention. Encryped? "Your keys, please."

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: Crikey - $800???

          "Classified material. I won't be given the key by my boss until I arrive at my destination. Since I'm not being charged, I'm not compelled to divulge. If you attempt to charge me, the executives at my company would like to have a word with you."

          1. Anonymous Coward
            Anonymous Coward

            Re: Crikey - $800???

            If you attempt to charge me, the executives at my company would like to have a word with you.

            That won't help, sorry. Better create a disk in a disk so you legit content plus an extra layer. They can't ask for what doesn't appear to be there.

    2. Bryan Hall

      Re: Crikey - $800???

      Spies need them. Small, high capacity, fast.

      You don't want that copy files progress bar to not make it to 100% before you are forced to leave - do you?

      :-)

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Crikey - $800???

        "Spies need them."

        That's what I'm thinking. The only place you'll see one is in the next Tom Cruise Mission Unpossible movie.

    3. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Crikey - $800???

      "What's even the point of that??"

      It's fast enough to run a VM directly off your external usb drive. That's the point of that.

      For me at least.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Crikey - $800???

        And expensive enough to replace your internal SSD with a much bigger, much faster one and run your VM even better off of that.

        Whatever - enjoy.

        1. Mark 65

          Re: Crikey - $800???

          And expensive enough to replace your internal SSD with a much bigger, much faster one and run your VM even better off of that.

          Just thinking the same. My 1TB NVMe SSD which runs at 2GB/s read speed cost less than that. Yes it's twice the storage but I think with SATA storage we are currently being gouged with unjustifiable prices for portable devices so they can make hay before the combine harvester falls off the cliff. I have a feeling prices for these devices will pootle along for a bit before taking a permanent nose dive.

        2. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: Crikey - $800???

          "And expensive enough to replace your internal SSD with a much bigger, much faster one "

          I already have a 512GB PCIE SSD. I have a lot more VMs than can comfortably fit in there, as I'm sure do many technology professionals.

  4. Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

    $130 for 250 GB pocket drive?

    A 200 GB microSD card costs under $80. It fits inside my phone without needing a second pocket.

  5. anothercynic Silver badge

    I use both the T1 and the T3...

    They are awesome little things. The T1 was plastic, the T3 is a mix of plastic and aluminium. And yes, I use these for virtual machine (and software) storage. The new T5 should be even more fun, although I suspect the T3 price will drop (at which point it makes sense to buy more of them).

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