Samsung’s Portable SSD T7 Touch scored our PCMag Editors’ Choice award and Best of the Year honors as the top external solid-state drive for 2020, largely on the strength of its fingerprint-based security system. The Samsung Portable SSD T7 (starts at $109.99 for 500GB; $369.99 for the 2TB version tested) saves you money by skipping the fingerprint reader and is available in a different set of colors. It’s a tiny, handy storage device with solid performance for its class, and while it lacks the convenience of the T7 Touch’s biometric security, its strong password-protected encryption should be more than adequate to protect your data.
A Good Thing in a Small Package
The T7 is a small aluminum rectangle with rounded edges, measuring 0.3 by 3.3 by 2.2 inches (HWD)—the length and width of a credit card, though considerably thicker—and weighing just 2 ounces. Color choices include gray, blue, and red. The T7 is minuscule compared with any portable hard drive, and it’s similar in size to the smallest external SSDs, including the T7 Touch, the Thunderbolt-based Samsung Portable SSD X5, the ADATA SE800, and the SanDisk Extreme Portable SSD.
The Portable SSD T7 has a USB Type-C port on one end. It’s a USB 3.2 Gen 2 connection capable of transfer speeds up to 10Gbps, which is much higher than the drive’s actual throughput. If you have a desktop, laptop, or smart device made in the last five years or so with a USB 3.x or Thunderbolt 3 port, the Samsung should be compatible with it, if not necessarily at its peak speeds. Next to the port is a tiny status light, which shines blue when the drive is connected and blinks when a data transfer is in progress.
Samsung provides both a USB-C cable and a Type-C-to-A cable in the box. The latter is a thoughtful addition, since it means you won’t need to buy an adapter or dongle if you’re connecting the device to a rectangular USB Type-A port. Some external SSDs, such as the WD My Passport SSD, come with such an adapter, but you’ll probably find a cable preferable as adapters are small and easily misplaced.
At $369.99, the 2TB version of the drive we tested comes to 18.5 cents per gigabyte (before a limited-time discount to $279.99 on Samsung’s website at this writing). You can also choose a 1TB drive for $189.99 or the 500GB model for $109.99. These are competitive prices for an SSD with PCI Express-based internals; the 500GB Samsung Portable SSD T7 Touch costs about 26 cents per gig, while the 500GB WD My Passport runs about 24 cents per gig.
Software and Security
The T7 comes preformatted in the exFAT file format, which means it should work with Windows, macOS, and Android without any reformatting needed on the user’s part. I tried out the software on the drive with a Dell XPS 13 running Windows 10.
You will have to install the Samsung Portable SSD software to set a password. Installers for the Windows and Mac versions of the software come already loaded on the drive, while the Android app can be downloaded from the Google Play Store on devices running Android 5.0 (Lollipop) or later. The T7 uses AES 256-bit hardware encryption, which is nearly unbreakable provided you use a strong password.
Samsung rates the T7 as being drop-resistant at up to 6.5 feet. It lacks a formal ingress protection (IP) rating, meaning it has not been tested for water or dust resistance. The WD My Passport SSD has a similarly basic set of durability features. But while the WD drive—like the more ruggedized SanDisk Extreme Portable SSD—is backed by a five-year warranty, the Samsung’s warranty is only for three years. Drives can be replaced, but your data can’t, so as always, be sure to keep a separate backup.
Testing the T7: Cool Runnings for a Hot Drive
SSDs tend to generate a lot more heat than spinning hard drives, and a tiny aluminum case tends to do the job for heat dissipation but can get toasty to the touch with sustained operations. Samsung addresses this in the T7 by including a phase-change layer—which absorbs and then gradually releases heat—next to the drive’s circuit board. It’s designed to keep the surface temperature below 45 degrees C (113 degrees F), and it seems to have done the trick. Even when transferring 300GB worth of files, the drive never got uncomfortably warm.
As a USB 3.2 Gen 2 device, the T7 is rated to achieve sequential read speeds of 1,050MBps and sequential write speeds of 1,000MBps. This is faster than SSDs that employ Serial ATA-based internals, whose read and write speeds usually top out around 550MBps and 520MBps, respectively, but slower than top-end drives with USB 3.2 Gen 2×2 interfaces, which tease sequential read-write speeds reaching about 2,000MBps. (We recently tested the 2020 version of the SanDisk Extreme Pro SSD at read and write speeds of 1,909MBps and 1,919MBps, respectively.)
The Samsung T7 supports the Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe) data transfer protocol for accessing SSDs over a PCI Express bus, which helps ensure fast transfer rates. It also uses triple-bit multi-level cell (MLC) flash memory technology. Samsung pioneered this cell-stacking approach, which essentially involves multiple layers of cells instead of just a single layer. Greater cell density can result in increased data speeds, all else being equal.
And so, onward to our benchmark results. The tests below were run on our desktop SSD testbed and on a 2016 MacBook Pro. (See how we test SSDs.)
In our sequential read and write testing using the Crystal DiskMark 6.0 utility, the T7’s scores of 958MBps read and 921MBps write were a bit short of its rated speeds but on par for its class, in the middle of a narrow range of scores turned in by a pack of solid-state drives with USB 3.2 Gen 2 connectivity. The Crucial X8, for example, posted an identical score in the read test and a slightly better 953MBps for writes, while the Samsung T7 Touch was very similar, at 952MBps read and 960MBps write.
The Editors’ Choice-winning WD My Passport SSD had a higher read speed (1,066MBps), while the SanDisk Extreme SSD (2020) did a bit better in both read (1,072MBps) and write (1,044MBps).
Verdict: To Touch, or Not to Touch, Is the Question
Although it lacks the fingerprint reader that made the Samsung Portable SSD T7 Touch PCMag’s favorite external solid-state drive of 2020, the Samsung Portable SSD T7 is a tiny yet very capable drive that retains its sibling’s 256-bit AES hardware encryption and comes in at a more modest price (some $30 lower than the T7 Touch for the 2TB version we tested).
The T7 is a cost-effective choice as a mainstream pocket SSD, whether for a business traveler or for housing a home media library. If you don’t need the biometric bulletproofing of fingerprint security, there’s no sense in paying extra for it.
