One of my biggest challenges is disk space. I constantly feel like I live on the edge being just a camera upload away from filling up my hard drive yet again. So what do you do when you’ve archived nonessential files to the cloud and maxed out the drive in your laptop but still need a reliable storage solution for photos and documents?
In my seemingly never ending search for the Holy Grail of storage, my new favorite device is the Samsung T1 500GB Solid State Drive (SSD) drive. This sleek, slim drive fits in the palm of my hand (it’s a lot thinner than a deck of cards and its footprint is smaller than a business card!), plugs directly into my USB port, and is lighting fast when transferring files. It’s perfect for storing tons of high-resolution photos, HD videos, and other files that you need to offload from your camera or laptop hard drive quickly.
What is a SSD Drive?
Solid State Drives (SSDs) are the latest innovation in computer storage that represents a new standard of storage for today’s digital life. SSDs are getting cheaper and cheaper every day and have the potential to completely eliminate hard drives in computers and tablets.
Under the cover, hard drives are like small record players. Little magnetic platters spin at speeds of up to 10,000 RPM while a magnetic head reads the data off your hard drive.
SSDs are completely different. An SSD has no moving parts, making it ideal for the mobile environment that we all live in today. If you were to crack open an SSD, you would find that it is essentially a bunch of flash memory chips connected to a controller card which makes them appear like a traditional hard drive.
Speed is another big advantage of the SSD. The time it takes an SSD to retrieve your data can be up to 100x faster than a hard drive. The Samsung SSD has a USB3 port, allowing for compatibility with standard USB2, and running at super-fast USB3 speeds if your computer supports it.
The speed of SSDs can make a phenomenal difference in opening booting your laptop, opening applications, or manipulating large files. If that’s not compelling enough, SSDs use less power than hard drives. Many recent tablets and ultra-portable laptops use SSDs, including all of the Retina MacBooks and Microsoft Surface tablets.
The Practicality of the Samsung T1 500GB SSD
This summer when we traveled to Turkey and Rome for our family vacation, I was insistent on traveling carry on which meant that our technology not only had to be high performing, but every device needed to be able to multitask while being highly portable. I wasn’t planning on doing any work besides occasionally checking emails but I was planning to take lots of photos.
My challenge was finding a solution that would allow me to shoot, upload, and edit photos on the go but I also needed to be able to back them up since the thought of losing vacation photos makes me shudder! I quickly ruled out normal cloud-based solutions because while they may work at home, I can’t even rely on them when I’m traveling for work in the States.
Thank goodness the Samsung 500GB SSD arrived just before our trip. Along with my beloved Samsung NX500 camera, Surface Pro 3, Note 3, and a brand new Samsung 32 GB Pro SD card it made for an easy backup solution while traveling. Photos from my NX500 were uploaded to my Surface Pro 3 and regularly backed up to the Samsung SSD. I was constantly amazed at the speed of the transfer.
For extra insurance, I never erased my SD cards during our travels, figuring that if something happened to my Surface or the SSD, I’d still have a copy of my photos on the card in the camera. Remember, redundant back up is your friend!
Summary
The Samsung T1 SSD provides speed and security for photos, videos, documents, and other data without sacrificing style and portability. It’s ideal for business travelers, creative professionals and content creators who may be in search of a secure storage solution that they can take with them on-the-go. Finally I feel that I’ve found the Holy Grail!
Samsung T1 SSDs are available in 250GB, 500GB, and 1TB sizes from online resellers like Amazon.
I received the Samsung T1 500GB SSD and a 32GB Pro SD card as a Samsung Imagelogger. No compensation was received for this post and all opinions are my own. Amazon Affiliate links included in this post.
