Samsung T7 Touch
A well needed update to a much loved external storage device.
It’s been a while. Samsung took more than a year to deliver a viable successor to the very well received T5. The T7, as it is now known, is available in two versions; a plain-vanilla model and one that packs a fingerprint reader and is known as the T7 Touch.
Three different capacities are available (500GB, 1TB, 2TB) and two colour schemes (black and silver). Both the T7 and T7 Touch come with a three-year limited warranty, Samsung’s Portable SSD Plus 1.0 software and AES 256-bit hardware encryption.
The T7 Touch looks very similar to the T5 but is a tiny bit bigger and heavier. 85 x 57 x 8.0 mm for a weight of 58g for the former and 74 x 57.3 x 10.5 mm for a weight of 51g for the latter. The hardware needed for the biometric feature explains the gain in weight.
Samsung stuck with the solid aluminum unibody construction which fits very snuggly in the palm of your hand.
The LED square also lights up with a cool blue glow to keep the user informed of what the SSD is doing at a glance. There’s a Type-C connector to which either of the two bundled cables can be connected.
All in all, a very clean and straightforward product that is utilitarian while being pleasing on the eye.
This is where the biggest difference between the T5 and the T7 (and the T7 Touch) can be found. Samsung has swapped the SATA-based SSD for an NVMe SSD behind the USB 3.2 Gen 2 bridge to offer up to significantly better performance. It is very likely that the T7 Touch uses sixthgeneration 136-layer V-NAND as opposed to the T5’s 64-layer V-NAND.
The T7 Touch came formatted as exFAT with a usable capacity of 931GB. It had three files on it, one of which was the bundled software – the Samsung Portable SSD Plus software – needed to enable fingerprinting capabilities.
You can also download the software as an app to use the
drive with your Android smartphone (assuming the latter has a Type-C connector). Setting up the fingerprint capabilities is straightforward, as easy as doing it on a smartphone and so is adding password protection to the T7 Touch.
Note that the device needs to be connected at all times for the fingerprint reader to work.
Samsung claims that the drive can achieve read/write speeds of up to 1.05GBps, which it says, is about twice what the T5 could reach. In real life we measured 1032 and 924MBps on CrystalDiskMark which is not that far from Samsung’s own readings.
The Samsung T7 Touch is an exquisite piece of technology; no it won’t prevent hacker groups backed by nation states from hacking your storage device but it will allow you to make it safer.