Samsung T7 Touch 1TB Review

1. Introduction2. Samsung T7 Touch 1TB3. ATTO/CrystalDiskMark/AS SSD4. Backup / Restore5. Throughput 6. Real Life File Transfers7. Closing Thoughts8. View All Pages

Samsung's latest addition to their long-running T* series of external SSDs is the T7 Touch. The new drive offers almost twice the performance of the previous USB driven external SSD, the T5, which is hardly surprising given that the T7 uses NVMe technology. It's also Samsung’s first SSD solution with fingerprint recognition security.

The official quoted transfer rates for the T7 Touch are reads up to 1,050MB/s and up to 1,000MB/s for writes. When tested with the ATTO benchmark the review drive fell a little short of both of these maximums with a read figure at 1,006MB/s and writes at 855MB/s.

Real-life file transfers saw read performance go over the 500MB/s mark on a few occasions when transferring data to and from a SATA drive. But the true potential of the drive was shown when transferring data to and from an NVMe SSD when we saw transfer rates as high as 949MB/s.

If you are going to stick a fast SSD in a wee package then you need to make sure that the thermals are taken care of. In the T7 Touch, Samsung uses a combination of Dynamic Thermal Guard technology, which prevents overheating by maintaining the drive's optimal working temperature, and something Samsung are calling an ePCM pad. A new technology, ePCM (Encapsulated Phase Change Materials) is a substance that acts as latent heat storage to absorb heat and release it gradually, stabilising the drive's temperature. Samsung says that the combination of these two technologies keeps the surface temperature of the T7 below 45°C.

The fingerprint sensor can register up to four different fingerprints, so just one device can be used by different family members or colleagues in an office. The drive supports Windows 7 and higher, Mac OS X 10.10 and higher and Android 5.1 (Lollipop) and higher and there’s a list of supported devices (Smart Phones, Tablets and TVs) on the Samsung website.

Overall, it’s a very compact design and the 1TB drive means you can carry around a large chunk of capacity in a coat or even shirt pocket, while it can run at a decent nick, too.

The UK price for the 1TB T7 Touch is £195.99 (inc VAT), and you can pre-order it from Amazon UK here:

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Pros

• Performance.
• Size.
• Fingerprint reader.

Cons

• 4K performance is a little disappointing.

KitGuru says: Samsung's new T7 Touch is a very compact, fast-performing drive with not only AES-256 encryption but also a built-in fingerprint reader for extra security for your data.

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