Did you know that it is perfectly OK to use this drive in pouring rain? Yep, this SSD is IP65 rated and has water, as well as dust resistance. I would recommend against using it under water, but it is nice to know that your important data is protected from the elements. Let’s check it out!
This is a Samsung T7 Shield drive that came out recently, adding to the existing T7 line up, which features standard model as well as fingerprint protected T7 Touch. It comes in two sizes - 1 and 2 terabytes, and has essentially the same internals. What you get is a slightly heavier and larger case as it features this ruggedized outer shell that extends past its ends. This adds an extra 1 metre of drop resistance from any angle when compared to other devices on top of the aforementioned water and dust protection.
In the box it comes with two cables: USB Type C to C and Type C to A. T7 Shield uses USB 3.2 Gen 2 aka 10 gigabit version on the device and has little status LED next to the connection. With the included cables it can essentially be connected to any modern device, unless you have an iPhone.
We actually own a Samsung T5 drive that was launched back in 2017 and have been super happy with it over the past couple of years. Both of these drives are very comparable, they look similar, have a sturdy build and are super compact. The T5 has this protective case which doubles as a cable holder to keep everything nice and neat. Personally I prefer this method, but I understand that some people may need protection while they are using the drive rather than only when storing it.
One thing to keep in mind - since the drive is covered with rubber, it attracts dust, lint and any other junk that may be in your bag or your pocket so don’t expect it to look super clean after a few weeks of use.
T5 is a lower-end drive. On paper it has about half the transfer speed, maxing out at 540 MB per second. T7 on the other hand is rated to hit speeds of up to 1050 MB per second. We ran these through some tests and can confirm this. In Crystal Disk mark T7 is right on point when it comes to sequential read and sequential write speeds.
If we look at the random read and write speeds the difference is gone and they perform basically identically. In fact T7 is slower on random reads when doing longer tests. Generally speaking external SSDs are used for transferring large files to and from them, so sequential speeds are more important. For a real life test I copied over my Steam library to each of the drives and found that T7 completed the job about 21% faster than T5. The Steam library has a mix of small and large files so it is a good example of a likely use case.
I then copied over the Epic library and found it to be almost twice as fast. This is partially because our T5 drive is 500GB in size so it is slowing down due to still having a Steam library and not having enough storage for fast caching, as well as T7 just being much faster.
So it is clear this SSD has plenty of performance and a bunch of utility, but that does come at a higher price. The rugged 1 TB version here in Singapore goes for 239 Singapore Dollars, while standard T7 is around 190. With that being said - there are situations where you need a drive that can take a beating. Creators who are working on the go, active lifestyle lovers, or if you are like me who tends to drop things, we all could benefit from the features this drive has. If you are one of these people - let me know your worst story with external drives.
So should you buy this Samsung T7 Shield SSD? Well, not everyone would necessarily need this level of protection. If you know that this portable drive is going to be used mostly indoors, I would choose something cheaper with less protection, however if you are always working when out and about this SSD is a decent contender to choose from, and one day it might even save you from losing very important data.
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