Samsung's T9 portable SSD is its first with USB 3 Gen 2x2, it achieves 2,000MB/s transfer speeds

The Samsung Portable SSD T9 is the company’s first with a USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 interface. This allows the external drives to reach 2,000MB/s sequential read and write speeds, twice as fast as the previous T7 drive (that one had a Gen 2x1 interface).

To help the drive stay fast, Samsung equipped it with its “Dynamic Thermal Guard”, which helps minimize slow downs due to thermal throttling. This is only for prolonged transfers, which may be rare – the drive is so quick that you can send a 4GB file to it in just two seconds.

The Samsung T9 SSD comes in four capacities: 1TB, 2TB and 4TB. They are all the same size physically, 88 x 60 x 14mm and they weigh 122g. The exterior is covered in a special pattern that makes it feel like cloth.

It’s much tougher than cloth, however, as it can withstand drops from up to 3m (10ft). The drive also has an operating temperature between 0°C and 60°C (32-140°F). It also provides a different kind of safety with AES 256-bit hardware encryption.

External storage is pretty much plug and play these days, but there is still a benefit from having an app – Samsung Magician 8.0. This one deals with maintenance tasks like firmware updates and health status checks, but also lets you benchmark the drive and manage its security functions. Magician is available for Windows, Mac and Android.

The drive also ships with two cables, USB C-to-C and USB A-to-C, so you can plug it into anything. This includes the new iPhones for things like ProRes video recording, though without the benefit of Samsung Magician. We should note that most of the USB-C cables you have laying around are probably not USB 3.2 Gen 2x2, so they won’t be able to drive the SSD at its maximum speed.

The Samsung Portable SSD T9 is available globally starting today. Check out the prices below:

By the way, if you’re on the lookout for an internal drive instead, Samsung recently launched a 4TB version of its SSD 990 Pro model (1TB and 2TB model were already available). There are two versions: with and without a heat sink.

The latter has a graphene heat spreader for devices that don’t have enough clearance for a proper heat sink. This doesn’t include the PlayStation 5, though, the heat sink version fits just fine in the console.

Samsung SSD 990 Pro 4TB (with heat sink)

This is a PCIe 4.0 drive that offer sequential read speeds up to 7,450MB/s, sequential writes up to 6,900MB/s and random operations at 1,600,000 and 1,550,000 IOPS, respectively. The base model is $345, the one with the heat sink is $10 more.

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