Samsung T7

It lacks its sibling’s biometric selling point, but there’s a lot to like about this cheerful drive

SCORE

PRICE 500GB, £49 (£59 inc VAT) from pcpro.link/324sam5

READ SPEED 965MB/ SEC

WRITE SPEED 7 73MB/ SEC

There’s something familiar about Samsung’s T7 external SSD. The name echoes that of the T7 Touch ( see p84), and design-wise this petite portable is practically its doppelgänger. The difference is that the T7 lacks the fingerprint reader. It still supports 256-bit AES encryption, but you’ll need to unlock it with a password rather than a prod.

Other than that, the two designs are distinguished solely by their colouring. While the T7 Touch comes only in sober black and silver varieties, the vanilla T7 offers vibrant blue and red finishes, along with a business-like grey.

With identical internals and the same USB 3.2 Gen 2 interface, the T7 achieves much the same benchmark scores as the T7 Touch. That means sequential read performance is pretty good, while write speeds are a trifle off the pace. Randomaccess performance is sub-par too, leading to a disappointing score of 871 in the PCMark data disk test – well behind the 1,500-plus ratings achieved by the SanDisk Extreme and WD My Passport SSD.

There’s a final variable to consider, and that’s price. The 500GB T7 drive is a mere fiver cheaper than the T7 Touch, which is hardly worth foregoing the fingerprint scanner for. If you want a full terabyte of storage, however, the T7 is much better value, coming in at £129 – equivalent to 14p per gigabyte – versus £167 for the Touch. If you can live with mid-range performance and aren’t bothered about biometric security, it’s not a bad price for a pleasingly portable and jauntily coloured SSD.