Samsung T9 SSD review: Storage for speedsters

I've never been the type of techie to shell out for extra storage when it comes to tech like smartphones and laptops. I'd rather pay less upfront and figure out the rest later. Sometimes this means paying for cloud storage. Other times it means investing in portable storage solutions like the new Samsung T9 SSD.

Samsung's T-series SSDs have been my go-to when it comes to gigabytes-on-the-go for a few years now and the formula hasn't changed too much with this iteration. Like its predecessors, the new Samsung T9 SSD is sleek to look at, built to take a hit and kitted out for even faster file transfer speeds. It's more than you could pay for a portable SSD, but it's easy to see where the money is going.

The Samsung T9 SSD is available in three sizes. The smallest of these is 1TB, which clocks in with a recommended retail price of $249. Doubing that 2TB will cost you $399 all told while opting for the largest 4TB size means paying $599.

For a sense of how much the Samsung T9 SSD costs from various retailers, check out the table below.

As said before, Samsung's latest portable SSD doesn't deviate too far from the one that came before it. Like the Samsung T7 series, it's roughly the same shape as a credit card but a little chunkier..More than just being backpack friendly, this thing can fit in your pocket.

Despite that compact form-factor, there haven't been any major compromises made to durability. The Samsung T9 SSD comes clad in a rubberised material that promises to absorb the kind of external shocks that would otherwise spell ruin. According to Samsung, the hardware here is good for drops of up to 3 meters.

At 122g, the Samsung T9 SSD is more of a paperweight than a featherweight. Still, it is slight enough that you can feel confident about carrying it around with you without a second thought. In addition to adding protection, the rubberised exterior here also means that you don't have to sweat the possibility of the T9 scratching or scraping against anything else in your bag. Add to that a dotted non-slip finish that makes that material more tactile to handle than you'd expect and you've got a recipe for a portable storage experience that both looks and feels good.

Beyond the sturdy yet squishy trappings surrounding the tech here, the only other parts of the Samsung T9's hardware worth touching on is the single USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 port and the LED status light that sits next to it. The former is used for the obvious while the latter is there to let you know if anything has gone wrong.

The T9 SSD also comes with a high speed USB-C to USB-C cable that allows you to get the most out of it out of the box. There's also a second USB-C to USB-A cable that's a little slower by nature but still pretty fast.

Out of the box, the Samsung T9 SSD is good for read speeds of up to 2,000mbps and write speeds of up to 1950mbps. It'll also play nice with pretty much everything, thanks to compatibility with Windows, macOS and Android.

You can use it without too much hassle out of the box, but you'll want to install the Samsung Magician Software if you want to get more granular when it comes to performance.

In practice, my experiences moving files around using the T9 SSD gave me little to complain about even if I rarely saw the fastest speeds the hardware here can theoretically deliver. You can only reach those lofty heights with a setup where every link in the chain is built for it, from the cable to the ports on your PC.

As is often the case with SSDs though, your mileage is going to vary based on what you're used to.

Where my current Samsung T5 SSD could move 57GB of files onto my PC in about eleven minutes, the T9 could do the same job in just two. Moving those same files from my PC to the newer SSD wasn't as much of an upgrade as the older one, but it was still a fairly brisk process overall that halved a 16-minute process into an 8-minute one.

One reason for this difference was that file transfers made using my T5 did tend towards much more erratic speeds than what I saw with the T9, though that may partially be due to a degradation in performance over time. More generally though, it's a credit to the peak transfer speeds that I encountered using the T9. At 600Mbps, Samsung's latest made short work of even bigger files.

The Samsung T9 SSD is one of the better options, but it's not the only one. Brands like Western Digital, SanDisk and others also have similar SSDS. It's also not that hard to track down the old Samsung T7 SSD. This option might not have access to the ultrafast speeds that the T9 does, but it's still plenty fast. For a sense of how the Samsung T9 SSD compares, check out the table below.