Samsung already had one of the best and fastest external SSDs that can seamlessly connect and work with devices across multiple platforms, the Samsung T5 SSD. At the CES 2020 event in Las Vegas, the company had come up with a successor to it, and the new Portable SSD T7 Touch is much better in every way, including the speed, the durability, and the security. The T7 Touch is a similar-looking SSD compared to the previous one but it certainly is about double the speed in terms of both, the read and write speeds, having about 1050 MB per second for writing and about 1000 MB per second as the read speeds. To compare, the T5 had speeds of about 540 MBps and it already seemed incredibly fast as the traditional hard drives in the market had just about 100 Mbps read and write speeds.
But, one major issue with most of the hard drives or even the SSDs is the durability. I’ve used hard drives from Western Digital and Sony in the recent past and had bad luck with them as accidentally dropping them resulted in the hard drive to not work at all. Now, there have been solutions coming up to save the discs within those hard drives by using some rugged exterior covers and such, but the SSDs use a different technology altogether and the internal make of them tends to keep itself safe. The T7 now is far more secure when it comes to the drop protection, with the drive keeping itself intact with falls from up to 2 meters height. Part of the safety is due to the aluminum exterior that it has got, but even the internal structure is such that it can withstand falls easily.
The next upgrade here from the T5 is with the security, as the T7 Touch, as the name suggests, has a touch area that would enroll fingerprints and use them for security so that only the owners with registered fingerprints can unlock and use the SSD when connected to a device. Of course, the regular password method is still available but the fingerprint one seems like a better option now. It uses the AES 256-bit encryption for security.
There’s an LED square present around the fingerprint area, and it lights up with the color indicators based on what is the SSD currently doing. Samsung is naming the two color options of the T7 Touch as Classic Black and Stylish Silver. As for the storage options, there are three options being made available – 500GB, 1TB, and 2TB.
While the new T7 SSD won’t be easy on the pocket with its price, the 58-gram light drive surely would have a performance to pay for, and I can see it doing better after using the T5 for a good amount of time and knowing that it is one of the best external SSDs out there, and with the direct Type-C to Type-C connectivity, it’s really easy to use this with any Android smartphone for the file transfers.
The T7 Touch also includes a three-year limited warranty with manufacturer’s suggested retail prices (MSRP) of $129.99 for the 500GB, $229.99 for the 1TB and $399.99 for the 2TB. There is also a non-touch variant coming in the second quarter of 2020, but we are not sure about the pricing yet.
