The bulk of high-capacity external storage devices still rely on mechanical drives with spinning platters and other delicate parts. That being the case, Samsung saw an opportunity to capitalize on a market segment that's seen very little action -- external SSDs.

To be clear, there are external storage devices that use SSDs, but Samsung's new Portable SSD T1 is more akin to a thumb drive, only wider and typically much faster. Utilizing Samsung's proprietary 3D Vertical NAND (V-NAND) technology and a SuperSpeed USB 3.0 interface, the Portable SSD T1 redlines at up to 450MB/s when reading or writing data sequentially, according to Samsung...