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Portable storage has come a long way. As much as I am not going to give my age away by mentioning rather large bulletproof hard drive contained external SSDs, being able to throw a portable SSD in your pocket, much less one that is capable of storing hundreds of thousands of pictures, songs or thousands of movies, is impressive. Such is the case with the Samsung Portable SSD T7 that we have in hand today that is 2TB large. This portable SSD is only 3.3″ long x 2.2″ wide by .03″ thick and weighs 2oz.
The T7 is available right now in capacities of 500GB to 2TB, comes with a 3-year warranty and is USB 3.2 Gen 2, which, in basic English, means it transfers data fast, 1GB/s fast as a matter of fact. It is available in red, blue or grey and its exterior is a single piece aluminum casing which speaks to durability. You could run this over and it’s still going to work. It uses Samsung’s V-NAND 3-Bit MLC memory (which is TLC memory) and also has Dynamic Thermal Protection to prevent overheating.
The Samsung T7 comes with two cables, a USB 3.1 to Type-C and a Type-C to Type-C. If you want to achieve speeds of 1GB/s, you need to connect the Type-C to Type-C to the T7 and the device you are plugging it into and it has to be AT LEAST USB 3.2 Gen 2 compatible. This will work with ThunderBolt 3 devices as well. If you are using the regular USB cable, you will be seeing performance north of 500MB/s which is still decent.
With respect to file security, the Samsung T7 is available in two versions, the T7 Touch which we previously reviewed here and the version we are reviewing today. While the T7 Touch can have its ‘vault’ opened by its fingerprint reader, the T7 we are reviewing today has software that takes a few minutes to set up and then your information is protected, AES 256-Bit hardware encryption protected. Let’s get a bit of info on the drive itself and check out some performance and see what the T7 is capable of…
Crystal Disk Info is a great tool for displaying the characteristics and health of storage devices. It displays everything from temperatures, the number of hours the device has been powered, and even to the extent of informing you of the firmware of the device.
ATTO Disk Benchmark is perhaps one of the oldest benchmarks going and is definitely the main staple for manufacturer performance specifications. ATTO uses RAW or compressible data and, for our benchmarks, we use a set length of 256mb and test both the read and write performance of various transfer sizes ranging from 0.5 to 8192kb. Manufacturers prefer this method of testing as it deals with raw (compressible) data rather than random (includes incompressible data) which, although more realistic, results in lower performance results.
Checking Amazon, the Samsung Portable SSD T7 is priced at $89.99 for the 500GB version, S159.99 for the 1TB and $299.99 for the 2TB version we are testing today.
Any word on when the Phison E-18 controller is coming out to retail? Been waiting for a drive that can max out the PCIE4 interface with 7GB read and write
No sir.
Well, I don’t know what I am doing wrong then, but my T7 is crap speed. 320 read and 280 write. On an iMac, M1, thunderbolt port.