Samsung T7 Shield portable SSD review: Blazing fast and built to last

By Patrick Centeno On Apr 26, 2022

In one look

Expert rating

Advantages

10 Gbps fast storage
Robust outer skin for an IP65 protection rating
Up to 2 TB capacity
Slender styling

The inconvenients

Not 20 Gbps
Not classified in total immersion

Our opinion

Faster than its Touch predecessor, the T7 Shield is also more robust. It lacks fingerprint scanning, but it’s otherwise a faster and more durable external SSD.

Price when reviewing

T7 Shield: $160 for 1TB | $290 for 2TB

If you’ve had your eyes on Samsung’s speedy T7 Touch 10Gbps USB, but weren’t sure if it was suitable for your harsh environment, your puzzle is over. The latest iteration of the T7 series – the T7 Shield – is IP65 rated to withstand wet weather and offers added protection against shocks (although it’s true that shocks are more important for portable hard drives than for portable SSDs). This is another premium USB drive from Samsung.

Design

The Samsung T7 Shield is a 10Gbps USB enclosure with an NVMe SSD inside. We’re a little surprised the latest version didn’t opt for 20Gbps USB, although it’s true that such ports are fairly rare and will remain so until full USB4 implementations become the norm. The T7 Shield is available in 1TB and 2TB capacities for $160 and $290 respectively, and you can buy them with protective blue, tan, or black silicone covers.

The drive measures 3.5 inches long by 2.3 inches wide by 0.5 inches thick and weighs just under four ounces. It’s a little heavier than the T7 Touch, but wrapped in a protective silicone sleeve, that’s hardly surprising.

The extra weight is inconsequential in terms of transportability and gives the T7 Shield a good heft. Indeed, I considered throwing it against a wall to test the impact resistance. I didn’t, although I dropped it about four feet onto a wooden floor with no ill effects.

The T7 Shield’s USB connector is Type-C and, aptly, Samsung includes both USB Type-A to Type-C and Type-C to Type-C cables.

As for the IP rating, 65 is a bit unusual. Most devices claim 67. If you want to know the full IP address, read this article from yours truly on our sister post TechHive. But the main thing is…

The first number, 6, means the T7 Shield can prevent just about any type of particle. The second number, 5, means you can spray it with water, but not submerge it. (7 would indicate that it is possible to survive immersion). There’s no doubt that the Type-C port is the culprit for poor liquid resistance, although we’ve seen them on plenty of Bluetooth speakers with the same port that claim IP67. Most cover the port with a captive socket, but not all.

Maybe Samsung is just a bit more conservative in its conclusions. I’m not saying to drop the T7 Shield in the pool, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it survived a short dive, as long as it’s not connected and active. If so, you have other problems.

Samsung’s toolbox for its external drives. With the Touch, you get fingerprint security. With the Shield, you set the password and you need to install the software on whatever computer you want to mount the drive on.

Although the Shield lacks the Touch’s fingerprint reader, it can still be password secured using Samsung’s Portable SSD software. Of course, you then need to install said software on any computer from which you want to access the drive. It’s certainly not as convenient as a simple finger swipe, but it’s doable.

Performance

The Samsung T7 Shield showed a noticeable performance improvement over its predecessor T7 Touch, especially when it came to writing files. Again, our Shield test unit was 2TB, where the Touch was 500GB. This will make a difference, especially on long writes, as the drive can handle more NAND as secondary SLC cache at a single bit/level.

We recently upgraded to the latest CrystalDiskMark, version 8.04, and a new benchmark, so these graphs are not directly comparable to previous disks. The two drives the Shield is compared to below have been retested, however. That said, CDM 8 demonstrates that noticeable write speed improvement I just talked about. (Right-click images and choose “Open image in new tab” to see full-size versions.)

Faster writing was also largely responsible for the better overall performance of our 48GB transfers shown below. The old Touch actually turned out to be a slightly faster reader.

The T7 Shield is a fast SSD at 10 Gbps and noticeably faster than its predecessor in writing.

Having 2TB instead of 500GB to play with was a godsend for the T7 Shield when it came to writing our one large 450GB file. That said, the LaCie was also 2TB and not quite as fast. Samsung has obviously upped its game (or its components) since the last iteration of the T7.

Having plenty of NAND to use as cache helps during extended writes.

There aren’t many 10Gbps SSDs out there that will outperform the Samsung T7 in terms of performance.

External USB drive tests currently using Windows 11 64-bit running on an MSI MEG X570/AMD Ryzen 3700X combo with four 16GB Kingston 2666MHz DDR4 modules, a Zotac (Nvidia) GT 710 1GB x2 PCIe graphics card and an Asmedia ASM3242 USB 3.2×2 card. The copy tests use an ImDisk RAM disk using 58 GB of the 64 GB of memory.

Conclusion

While we’d like to see a bit better sealing, the Samsung T7 Shield is indeed a much better reader for harsh environments than the Touch. Obviously it lacks the convenience of fingerprint security offered by the Touch, but it’s more capable and you can still secure it via software. Again: this is another excellent portable player from Samsung, and highly recommended.