Samsung T7 Shield 10Gbps Portable SSD Review – 4TB of External Storage Goodness

Sometimes small things surprise us.  Samsung just pulled this off with their newest T7 Shield which has just been released in a massive 4TB capacity.  You see… this is not typical of Samsung to push out such high capacity storage as it goes against their business model.  I know this as I had a very lengthy conversation with Samsung in South Korea about just this a number of years back right around the time the XP941 M.2 SSD was on their drawing board. That was around 2012 or 2013. Sort of amusing…just realized how long I have been at this.

Samsung likes the comfort of mass sales.  They are the polar opposite of Sabrent. This is not to say that Samsung has never marketed a 4TB SSD because they did with 850/60/70 series SATA 2.5″ SSDs, but just ask yourself, when was the last time you saw a 4TB M.2 or external SSD from Samsung?  This is a rather big step for Samsung…and it’s one of the few times that we have ever been asked and/or found ourselves doing a review of a previously reviewed product…but larger capacity.  We reviewed the Samsung T7 Shield 2TB capacity back in June of 2022 and you may find both reports very similar, except this one is twice the capacity and not ‘beige’ err… tan.

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The Samsung T7 Shield 4TB Portable SSD comes in black and has a metal frame surrounded by a very soft exterior permanently affixed silicone casing.  This casing is a dust magnet which is evident if you take a close look at the photo below, left that way intentionally for demonstration purposes.  Believe it or not, these particles aren’t visible to the naked eye unless you look real close.  Click on the picture to enlarge it.  This was brand spanking new out of the package.

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The package includes a multi-language user manual, USB Type A to Type C cable, USB Type-C to Type-C cable and the T7 itself. As a bit of a reminder simply because we still get many messages asking why speeds of a readers new SSD don’t match our results, the Samsung T7 Shield is a USB 3.2 Gen 2 SSD which is capable of up to 1050MB/s transfer speeds (10Gbps).  One needs a system with at least a 10Gbps USB Type-C port as shown below to get these same speeds.  Otherwise, the Type-A to Type-C cable is fully compatible with older systems and should get you transfer speeds just above 500MB/s at best.

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SSD performance is listed at being 1050MB/s read and 1000MB/s write with dimensions of 3.5 x 2.3 x .05 inches and a weight of 3.47 oz.  This product is 3 metres drop resistant, IP65-certified as being water and dust resistant and contains Samsung’s Portable SSD 1.0 security software which works with the SSDs AES 256-bit hardware encryption and provides complete data security in only a few steps.

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Just as valuable, but not included on the T7 Shield, is the Samsung Magician software which can be downloaded and serves to provide a large number of maintenance and performance features.

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The Samsung Portable SSD T7 Shield is compatible with Windows, Mac and Android, comes with a 3-year warranty, and we aren’t seeing this capacity on Amazon just yet, but its MSRP is $429.99.  Check Amazon for availability.

Let’s turn the page and take a look at performance…

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