The perennial worry for serious gaming fans: how long before your GPU starts chugging through games? But another struggle has popped up in the last few years.
Will your games even fit on your computer? Nowadays a single game can gobble up as much as 150GB, larger than the capacity of some laptops' drives even today.
The Samsung T5 is a solution. It's a tiny SSD that fits in the palm of your hand but squeezes in up to 2TB of storage. Or, in real life terms, most likely every game you'll pay in the next six months, if not longer.
Pocket power
The best bit is you can fit the Samsung T5 in your pocket, plug it into your computer when needed and even take Steam install directories over to a friend’s house and save those hours of download time.
Even if you do end up needing to share your games' install files with a friend, the 540MB/s transfer rate* will fling data over in minutes rather than hours. No one wants to wait an age just to start playing.
Think of a Samsung T5 as your saved Spotify playlist of AAA games you can take anywhere.
Built for the road
It really can go anywhere too. Drop it from 2m and it'll be fine. A few days rumbling around in your rucksack while you’re busy with work or lectures? No problem.
This is a seriously rugged external drive, and you'd never guess from its appearance. The Samsung T5 has an anodized aluminium shell that looks as slick as any smartphone, and comes in a bunch of colors including black, blue, red and gold.
We’re not saying you need to match your SSD to your gaming rig. But you can if you want. We have a bit of a crush on the red Samsung T5 SSD.
Choices, choices
You don't have to be a hardcore game-swapper to make good use of the Samsung Portable SSD T5 either. It comes in storage levels from 250GB all the way up to 2TB.
Match it to your needs and you're looking at the ideal way to take your games with you, wherever you want to go. And the Samsung Portable SSD T5 also means you won't have to crack open your PC case and start fiddling with connectors.
The range currently starts at just $94.99 (£96, AU$169) for the 500GB version. Samsung's 1TB T5 SSD costs $169.99 (£173, AU$339) and the top-end 2TB drive is $279.99 (£352, AU$629).
These are sale prices, with RRPs of normally $97.99, $197.99 and $399.99 respectively.
You can find additional information at Samsung.com.
*Figures based on Samsung testing. Performance may vary depending on host configuration. To reach maximum transfer speeds of 540 MB/s, the host device and connection cables must support USB 3.1 Gen 2 and the UASP mode must be enabled.
