Tiny but Mighty: My Newest Travel Companion

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As a travel photographer and photojournalist, I can easily take thousands of photos on my travels. In my carryon bag, you will find numerous SD cards, my MacBook Pro for editing photos, a variety of DSLR and digital cameras, lenses and hot sauce. Because sriracha :) Whether it’s so I can edit and share photos or to make some space on my SD cards, it never fails that I end up needing to dump some of my photos onto my Macbook during travel.

One of the great features of my laptop is that its hard drive utilizes onboard flash storage, which basically means that it runs and retrieves files incredibly quickly. But when my file size for each photo is well over 10 megabytes (huge) that 128GB of storage doesn’t go very far. So I’ve been carrying around a fairly hefty brick of an external hard drive for as long as I can remember. Actually several. That is, until I was sent the new Samsung T3 Portable SSD. I’ve been eyeing this portable drive for a while now and when it finally arrived, I could not believe how tiny it was. Weighing in at less than 2 ounces and roughly the size of a business card, it gives new meaning to portable hard drives. Game changer.

samsung t3 portable ssd

It may be tiny, but it’s also mighty. The Samsung T3 can store up to 2TB of data so I can click the shutter until my heart’s content and carry up to 4TB of data in a small pocket. It’s also durable and rugged, an important feature when your tech bag travels over a 150,000 miles a year from the beaches of Caribbean to the glaciers of Iceland and everywhere in between. But I think my favorite feature is that the shock-resistant T3 has no moving parts and a strong exterior metal body that can withstand up to 1500G of force (the equivalent of a drop of up to 6.5 feet!). A life saver for someone as clumsy as I am.

If you have been around the blog any length of time, you will notice I don’t discriminate against technology. It’s not unusual to find me carrying a mixture of Windows, Apple, and Android operating systems. So it’s important that the T3 is compatible across multiple operating systems and also comes with a USB 3.1 Type-C connection port and USB Type-C to Type A cable, making it even more versatile. 

samsung t3 portable ssd

While all of these qualities are great, they would be useless if the Samsung T3 Portable SSD wasn’t also blazing fast. I spend the majority of my travels darting from one adventure to the next – only stopping at my hotel, cabin or hammock long enough to change clothes, catch a few winks and share a couple of photos. It’s important that all of my tech can keep up with me. The T3 is more than capable of holding it’s own against my zippy hard drive with read/write speeds of up to 450MB/s. (To put it in perspective, that’s about 4x faster than traditional portable hard drives.)

Now I have more room in my travel bag and more storage for my photography, two things that give a traveler a happy heart. 

sunset heart silhouette

Thank you Samsung for providing two Samsung T3 Portable SSD devices for this review. All opinions remain my own.

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