[Samsung Galaxy Tab S8] drjoe1:
I've never been happy with file transfer for my Tab S8+, or for any of my Samsung Tab's or phones in general. I know that the Tab S8 series "only" has 5Gbps USB 3.0 / 3.1 Gen 1 / 3.2 technology (aren't USB standards a mess?), but when transferring larger files (in my case, full-game American football vids), it takes ages to transfer the files to / from my PC either directly via cable or using a USB flash drive.

I travel for work, spending ~ 1/3 of my time in South Korea. So I've set up a DeX server using an out-of-service S10+ phone. The phone is connected to a UGreen hub to the hotel room TV. I also connect an external 1TB hard drive that has movies, TV and football videos.

I was good this year, so Santa brought me a Transcend ESD310C to 1TB SSD. This has dual 10Gbps USB A and USB C built in connectors and comes in the form factor of an old Kingston Data Traveler flash drive. See picture below.

View attachment 6053268

Leftmost is my SanDisk Dual drive, then an old DataTraveler for scale, the ESD310C SDD, and rightmost is my external HDD (laptop drive size format).

You can find CrystalMark drive tests on the ESD310C online. I'm not so interested in bench mark tests because I have never seen bench level performance in real life. SO I ran my own test comparing the transfer speeds for three devices using a 3GB video file.

1) Sandisk Ultra Dual USB 3.0 (same as 3.2 Gen 1x1) -- 5Gbps ----- connected by USB C to tablet

2) WD Passport USB 3.2 Gen 1x1 -- 5Gbps ----- connected by cable, USB 3 Micro to USB C to tablet ( in the picture the cable is USB 3 micro to USB A)

3) Transcend ESD310C USB 3.2 Gen 2x1 -- 10Gbps ----- connected by USB C to tablet

All of the storage devices were formatted exFAT.

My "test" system is a Galaxy Tab S8 Plus (USB C 3.2 Gen 1x1 -- 5Gbps)

My tablet's external SD Card is a SanDisk Extreme U3/A2/V30

I used Solid Explorer for file transfer

View attachment 6053274

These transfer times were very repeatable (within a few seconds).

This seems to be telling us what the limiting factors are. The SSD is as fast or faster in all transfers.

1) The transfer speed from the flash drive, HDD and SDD to the external SD card was the same for all devices, suggesting that this is a limit on the Tab S8+ hardware (or of the SD card itself)

2) Copying from the external SD card to the HDD and the SSD was the same, and similar to the reverse transfer (1 above), again suggesting this is a limit on the Tab S8+ hardware (or of the SD card itself)

3) Copying from the SSD to / from the internal memory was ~ 3x faster than for the HDD (and flash drive to the internal memory). This suggests that the limiting factor is the USB controller on the devices. For some reason, the 10Gbps transfer rate for the SDD gets the tablet USB C 5Gbps closer to optimum than for the flash and HDD.

4) Transfer from both the internal memory and the external SD card to the flash drive was as slow as molasses. This seems to be a function of the flash drive as it was much worse than the HDD or SDD. I'm under the impression that flash drive USB chips have been optimized to transfer data off the stick, so maybe it makes sense that data transfer to the stick is so slow.

My take-aways:

I was always disappointed with flash drive transfer speed, this showed how bad it really is. The speed for the SSD matches or exceeds the HDD which is awesome when you consider the form factor for the SSD is so much smaller. I was surprised that the SSD was faster copying to/from the internal memory, because I would have thought this to be limited by the Tab S8+ hardware. But the SDD is faster. And while the form factor for the SSD is about 3x larger than a modern flash drive like the SanDisk Ultra Dual drive, it is still small enough to be truly "fit in your pocket" portable, with plenty of storage space for image and video files.

I do wish the endcaps on the SSD were more secure, and it would be nice if it had included a hole for lanyard.

This was well worth $70 (from Amazon)

Take care,

Joe