Samsung T7 Shield Portable SSD Review: Rugged, Secure Storage Solution

Samsung T7 Shield Build Quality

The Samsung T7 Shield portal SSD has a compact package, making it easy to slip into your bag. The SSD is even smaller than most modern smartphones, and its external rubbed gasket protects it against accidental falls of up to three meters.

During our testing, we tossed around the SSD, and it did not sustain any physical damage. Moreover, the T7 Shield is also IP65-rated for water and dust resistance, making it a more durable storage device.

The T7 Shield comes in three shades, and we got our hands on the Beige variant. Due to the rubberized external finish, the device can attract dirt pretty quickly. However, just a freshwater rinse will bring it back to glory.

The Term Shield Explained

The T7 Shield is no ordinary external storage device, as it "shields" your data physically and digitally. The rugged nature of the hard drive protects against physical damage and has AES 256-bit hardware encryption that protects digital data.

To offer data encryption, the SSD is equipped with the company's proprietary Portable SSD software 1.0. In fact, the drive itself includes the Windows, macOS, and Android versions of this software for ease of installation on most modern computing devices.

This software allows users to set a password, and the data can only be accessed upon successful authentication. What's more, it works on Android, Windows, and macOS. You can configure the drive on a PC or a smartphone and use the same password on other devices to access the drive.

Samsung T7 Shield Performance

The Samsung T7 Shield uses NAND flash-based NVMe Gen3 technology that claims to churn out an average read speed of 1,050MB/s and an average write speed of 1,000 MB/s when used on a PC supporting USB 3.2 Gen2.

We put the T7 Shield through some tests on the Alienware x15 R2 gaming laptop. On CrystalDiskmark 8 benchmark, the drive only offered a maximum sequential read and write speed of 459MB/s and 450MB/s respectively.

What About Real World Performance?

We tried copying a large game file (77GB) and we got an average write speed of 330MB/s. As per the test, it took around four minutes to copy the entire file. It means the drive can write up to 20GB of data in just a minute or three seconds to copy 1GB of data.

Verdict: A Rugged And Secure Solution

While there are plenty of external storage devices with similar performance that can be bought for a lower price than the Samsung T7 Shield, not many come close to the overall package the T7 Shield has to offer. So, if you are looking for an external storage device with a rugged design and added data security, the Samsung T7 Shield is what you seek.