Samsung T5 SSD cable types

[ayaka19]

Hi all, I purchased a Samsung T5 SSD a couple years ago to work with my old mac with USB-A port: https://www.techradar.com/au/reviews/samsung-portable-ssd-t5

Now I've just upgraded my Mac and it now has a USB-C (and USB-A as well), I think I threw away the Samsung box, but is there a difference between connecting it to the USB-A port, or would it be slower in speed?

 

[chabig]

It depends which Mac you have, it's ports, and has nothing to do with the cable. Check out your machine's specs.

https://support.apple.com/specs

 

[ayaka19]

It depends which Mac you have. Check out your machine's specs.

https://support.apple.com/specs

I have a Mac Mini with these ports:

• Two Thunderbolt / USB 4 ports with support for:
  • DisplayPort
  • Thunderbolt 3 (up to 40 Gb/s)
  • USB 3.1 Gen 2 (up to 10 Gb/s)
  • Thunderbolt 2, HDMI, DVI, and VGA supported using adapters (sold separately)
• Two USB-A ports (up to 5 Gb/s)

But I guess the question is, does the 5Gb/s speed of the USB-A port already saturate the speed of the Samsung T5 SSD?

 

[chabig]

does the 5Gb/s speed of the USB-A port already saturate the speed of the Samsung T5 SSD?

No it does not. The T5 supports speed up to 10Gbps. I can confirm that it's faster on the USB 3.1 Gen 2 port. But I have also always found it plenty fast at 5Gbps.

 

[ght56]

You can get a 10 Gbps USB-C to USB-C cable for pretty cheap-I just got a 1 foot braided one for like 8 bucks (a passive Thunderbolt 3 cable will work as well, although this would be more expensive to accomplish the same end result.)

 

[ayaka19]

You can get a 10 Gbps USB-C to USB-C cable for pretty cheap-I just got a 1 foot braided one for like 8 bucks (a passive Thunderbolt 3 cable will work as well, although this would be more expensive to accomplish the same end result.)

Yeah I understand it's pretty cheap, but just don't wanna waste a USB-C port if the speed is gonna be the same as USB-A.

 

[ght56]

Yeah I understand it's pretty cheap, but just don't wanna waste a USB-C port if the speed is gonna be the same as USB-A.

IIRC, the T5 uses a SATA bridge and so its max theoretical performance is the 6.0 Gbps ceiling of SATA 3 and max actual performance at the threshold of about 575 MB/s in the absolute best case scenario (non-encrypted, empty drive, HFS+, larger file sizes). USB 3.2 gen 1 (AKA 3.1 gen 1 AKA 3.0 AKA USB 5 Gbps) doesn't quite get there after overhead, but it can get pretty close with UASP.


This is a 2 GB Samsung 860 Pro, empty, formatted to HFS+, using 10 Gbps USB (tested on a 2019 16-inch MacBook Pro, using an enclosure with a 10 Gbps AS Media chipset)


This is the same everything, except USB has been constrained to the 5 Gbps ceiling using an older USB 3.2 gen 1 hub
(scaling of the table is a bit different)


As you see, with larger transfer sizes, you're looking at a difference of about 100 MB/s with reads and a bit less writes. If you are constantly moving larger files, that can be a pretty substantial difference. Obviously these don't exactly speak to the specifics of the T5, but they should give you a general idea of the difference.

 

[Fishrrman]

If you connect via a USBa port, you should see read speeds around 430MBps.

If you connect via a USBc port, you should see slightly higher read speeds, perhaps up around 500MBps.

My -guess- is that you probably won't "notice the difference" much either way.

 

[ayaka19]

Thank you all, this is pretty helpful. I think I will keep it on USB-A until I feel like I need more speed.