Innovation of the week: the Samsung Portable SSD T1 drive

published 30 January 2015

"Storage is not sexy," said Raymond Wong at Mashable. But Samsung's new Portable SSD T1 drive offers both security and speed "in high style without going overboard." It packs an incredible terabyte of data storage in a drive the size of a business card, weighing less than an ounce. The drive is so small that "Samsung says you can slide it into a wallet." The compact drive will help security-minded users feel at ease, too, with some "real NSA-level protection." And unlike traditional hard drives, which have moving mechanical parts, the T1 is solid state, which means "it can be thrown around like a hot potato and the stored data will be safe." It's also fast — with the right equipment, you can transfer a 3GB file in eight seconds. But this high-capacity, high-speed drive also comes at a high-price: $599 for a whole terabyte, $299 for 500GB, and $179 for 250 GB.