Samsung T7 TOUCH MU-PC500K/WW 500 GB

Compact, fast and reliable

The laurels of the king in the world of solid state drives do not allow Samsung to release boring and banal products. Here is the new external SSD T7 TOUCH, presented at the beginning of 2020, which can pleasantly surprise. It's a tiny, credit-card- or cigarette-pack-sized drive that sets speed records for external SSDs and has an ace up its sleeve in the form of cryptographic protection.

Speed up to 1050MB/s

Let's start with speed. Compared to its predecessor Samsung T5 on paper, the novelty is twice as fast: 1050 MB / s for sequential reading and 1000 MB / s for sequential writing. Here the company actually hits the ceiling of the USB 3.2 Gen 2 standard. Given that Samsung uses high-end memory and an NVMe controller of its own production, the words do not really diverge from the case and we really have one of the fastest external SSDs on the market. In reality, with normal single-threaded read and write operations, the speedometer is kept at 700 – 800 MB / s, and when the SLC cache is full, there is only a twofold drawdown. The only thing in which it is not as cool as expected is the work with small-block operations. This is probably done on purpose so that next year the engineers have room for manoeuvre, otherwise there would be no point in releasing the Samsung T8. And it is unlikely that such a speed will not be enough for someone.

Built-in encryption with fingerprint unlock

In addition to speed, the drive attracts with its versatility, 2 different cables are included, and the SSD itself can be easily tied to completely different devices, whether it be a Windows-based laptop, an Android smartphone or an iPad with the latest version of iOS. Well, the ace mentioned at the beginning is a 256-bit AES hardware encryption of recorded data with fingerprint unlock, which is built into the system and does not require the installation of additional software. If the fingerprint scanner seems like overkill to you and you want to save a little, then the regular Samsung T7 is also on the market in the same compact package, with the same USB C 3.2 gen2 connection and with the same fast SSD. But without a fingerprint scanner and cheaper. Still, almost $ 150 for an external drive will seem to many not the most reasonable waste.