Samsung T7 Touch Portable SSD - The Ultimate Black Box?

When you’re as much of a digital native as I am, you’ll likely have accumulated a dizzying amount of files that you need to store somewhere. From photos, to scans of important documents like house rental contracts, to files for your latest and greatest project, video or blog article, to all of the Luther accoutrements that come with living in the digital age, you’ll likely have gigabytes of stuff lying around either on your computer’s drives or in a cloud storage service somewhere. I know that’s the situation that I found myself being confronted with a while ago and between this splintering and the fact that prices were beginning to rise even for said cloud services, I decided to finally consolidate all these files on a single external drive that I could take with me wherever I needed it.

But which drive to use? I had several external HDDs lying around at home, but these were rather large and not really mobile enough for my purpose. I’d looked at SSDs before, but in the past, the relationship of price to storage capacity had not seemed quite right. Having said that, I’d already seen previous iterations of Samsung’s T series external SSDs in the various airside shops at Schiphol Airport back in the days when I still regularly flew to Germany to visit my parents, and it had taken some serious self control not to splurge on one of them back in the days. They weren’t cheap, hell, they still aren’t, but there’s something about them. 

Anyway, eventually, I settled on one of Samsung’s new T7 external SSDs. I was just about to splurge on a regular 1TB Samsung T7 in red when another model caught my attention. Apparently, Samsung had launched a specially secured model of the T7 alongside its regular models. The T7 Touch offered on-device encryption and unlocking by way of a built-in fingerprint sensor. Okay, granted, many manufacturers offer some sort of encryption with their HDDs and SSDs, but the fingerprint sensor as an additional level of security is what really caught my attention. 

I had had an issue with my Blogging page on Facebook being compromised a while back and ever since then, I’d taken care to make sure all of my online services have random passwords, use biometric identification where possible and use Two-Factor Authentication on every platform that offers it. Now granted, I know that the onboard encryption on the T7 Touch will likely not be enough to keep out determined state actors, but I’m not looking to keep out GCHQ or NSA here. I’m looking to prevent anyone w1ho may find this drive by chance from snooping through my data, and for such random encounters, the T7 Touch is more than enough.

Tech Specs

The T7 Touch is only the size of a credit card, though it is obviously quite a lot thicker. That blue LED will show any read or write activity on the SSD.

It really is quite an attractive little package in my eyes.

There’s really not that much to write about in the specs department. The T7 Touch is pretty small. At 85 x 57 x 8mm, it is barely larger than a credit card, the only difference is that the T7 is obviously quite a bit thicker. It is pretty light at 58 grams, although it’s aluminium unibody makes it feel pretty damn solid. The front of said unibody houses the fingerprint reader which is combined with a status LED, whilst the top contains the USB-C port. The SSD ships with both USB-C to USB-C and USB-C to USB-A cables. Capacity-wise, Samsung offers the T7 Touch in three sizes, 500GB, 1TB and 2TB. The company promises transfer speeds up to 1000MB/sec, whilst the drive also offers AES 256-bit hardware encryption.

Setup & Use

You're going to need a desktop or laptop to set up the encryption features.

Once again, there’s not much to say about setup. It’s literally plug-and-play. By default, the drive is unencrypted and formatted in exFat, meaning that it can be used by all major operating systems and probably even Linux, though I haven’t used the latter in a while so I’m not sure there. The drive comes preloaded with a Samsung utility to set up password protection and register fingerprints. This is available for Windows and MacOS, whilst a link to download the Android version is also included. There is now iOS app, so you’ll need a desktop or laptop machine to set up encryption.

This is done quick and easy. Just plug in the drive, launch the app, and the software will guide you through the rest of the process. You must set up a password before you can register your fingerprints. Registering those should be familiar to anyone who has ever used a smartphone with a fingerprint scanner or who has ever used Apple’s TouchID. Once that is done, you’re good to go.

Once everything is set up, using the T7 Touch is a breeze.

In everyday use, the T7 Touch is as convenient and easy to use as you’d want an external SSD to be. It’s diminutive size makes it easy to just slip the drive into a backpack or even your pocket. I’ve been taking mine everywhere since I got it, well, at least anywhere that my iPad or MacBook goes, and it really is just unobtrusive and barely even noticeable until you need it. When you plug in the drive, it will show up as a read-only drive with only the preloaded apps being visible. It is only when you unlock the drive with your fingerprint that the entire content becomes visible. Unlocking can take a second or two, the fingerprint reader is apparently not the quickest, but since all the encryption happens on the SSD, it is indeed device-agnostic. I’ve been using mine with my iPad mini 6 since I got the drive and it works just as seamlessly as it does on my MacBook. I haven’t tried it on Windows, since I recently sold my Surface Go 2 and I doubt that my employer would be too happy if I suddenly plugged in an external drive to my company laptop.

Since any decryption takes place on the SSD itself, you can use the T7 Touch with any device that has either a USB-A or USB-C port, like the iPad mini 6.

I certainly have no complaints about the speed of the drive. Whilst I haven’t run any benchmarks to verify that the speeds that Samsung promises are actually accurate or achievable, I can definitely say that the drive certainly feels lightning fast. I’ve used it with my MacBook to edit photoshop files directly on the drive and it’s turning out to be an even faster option that working with Adobe’s Creative Cloud. The drive does get somewhat warm with prolonged use, so I’d expect that really large file transfers will likely see the T7 Touch slow down somewhat due to thermal throttling, but honestly, that’s to be expected. Even regular USB sticks can get surprisingly warm after all.

Now, before we get to the conclusion I do need to address a rather sizeable elephant in the room, especially from an Irish perspective, and that is price. When I first started looking around, the only Irish retailer that I could find that stocked the T7 Touch listed it at 269€ for the 1TB version. Another retailer listed it at 199€ but had her unavailable for delivery and out of stock at every store south of Dublin. I ended up ordering from Amazon who sold it for 155€ including free express delivery for Amazon Prime members. I try to stay away from Amazon these days, but with such rip-off prices, Irish retailers really need to take a long hard look at themselves. German big-box retailer Saturn offers the T7 Touch for 139€, by the way!

Conclusion

The Samsung T7 Touch Portable SSD is certainly turning out to be a neat little device. It is fast, lightweight, compact, and the added security provided by the fingerprint reader is very welcome. With its diminutive size and low weight, it’s easy to just drop it in a backpack without feeling like you’ve dropped in another brick. It has quickly become part of my everyday carry and I really look forward to using it on a couple of business trips I have coming up in the next few months. If you’re in the market for an external SSD, are looking for that little bit of extra security, and have the budget to pay for it, the T7 Touch is really an excellent choice. Just do yourself a favour and shop around, especially if you’re in Ireland. Some retailers are truly charging ripoff prices!