JUNE 2022 PCWorld 67Samsung T7 Shield SSDPROS- Fast 10Gbps storage.
- Rugged outer skin for IP65 rating.
- Up to 2TB in capacity.
- Svelte styling.
CONS - No 20Gbps.
- Not full immersion rated.
BOTTOM LINE
Faster than its Touch predecessor, the T7 Shield is
also more rugged. It lacks fingerprint scanning, but is
otherwise a faster, more durable external SSD.
$160
than the Touch. It lacks the convenience of
fingerprint security that the Touch offers, but it’s
a better performer and you can still secure it via
software. It’s another great portable drive from
Samsung, and comes highly recommended.Quicker writing
was also largely
responsible for the
better overall
performance in our
48GB transfers
shown below. The
older Touch actually
proved a slightly
faster reader.
Having 2TB
instead of 500GB to
play with was a
boon for the T7
Shield when it came
to writing our single
large 450GB file. That said, the LaCie was also
2TB and not as quick. Samsung has obviously
been upping its game (or components) since the
last T7 iteration. There aren’t many 10Gbps SSDs
that will top the Samsung T7 in performance.
External USB drive tests currently utilize
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. Copy tests utilize an ImDisk RAM disk
using 58GB of the 64GB of memory.
VERDICT
Though we’d like to see a bit better
waterproofing, the Samsung T7 Shield is
indeed a much better drive for harsh environs
The Samsung T7 Shield showed a noticeable performance improvement over its
T7 Touch predecessor.