Matthew DeCarlo
Samsung unveiled a successor to its popular T5 portable SSD and it’s crazy fast. And a built-in fingerprint scanner lets you unlock the AES 256-bit hardware encryption without remembering a stupid password.
Available in variants with and without the fingerprint scanner, the new Samsung Portable SSD T7 uses the latest USB 3.2 Type-C standard and touts read speeds of up to 1050 MB/s along with a maximum write rate of 1000 MB/s. That’s quite a leap over the T5’s peak reads and writes of 540 MB/s and 520 MB/s—enough of a boost that the T7 would already have our attention without any additional features.
As the cherry on top of that stellar performance increase, Samsung incorporated biometric security. The T7 Touch features an embedded fingerprint reader on top of the drive. That’s an industry first and a big deal for anyone who hates keeping track of passwords (who doesn’t?). If the fingerprint reader doesn’t appeal to you, there’s a non-Touch T7 that excludes biometric security, and you can go about your business using a regular password to unlock the drive’s hardware encryption.
The T7 measures 3.3 x 2.2 x 0.3 inches, weighs 58 grams, and it should be every bit as pocketable as Samsung’s existing T5. Models include 500 GB, 1 TB, and 2 TB capacities, which will have MSRPs of $129.99, $229.99, and $399.99. Samsung says it plans to ship the T7 Touch starting this month, while the version without a fingerprint sensor will arrive sometime in the second quarter of 2020. Both will come in your choice of black or silver.
