Samsung T7 Shield review

Two years after the T7 was launched Samsung delivers a more resilient design but doesn’t make it any faster

Back in 2020, Samsung launched the T7 Touch, a biometrically secure external SSD, and a few months later a cheaper no-frills T7 version that proved a very popular choice.

The Samsung T7 Touch offered a 10Gbit USB connection and could read and write files at close to 1,000MB/s, making it ideal for those looking to catch a plane, train or boat with critical files from the office secured on the drive.

Now, Samsung has revamped the T7 to bring us the T7 Shield. With the original T7 still selling, what makes the Shield the T7 that potential customers might want?

Design & Build

Samsung makes the new T7 Shield in three colours, and they sent me the one with the least aesthetically pleasing colour for review. The black and the blue aren’t exciting colours, but the beige one harks back to a bygone era when all computers came in variations on a theme of brown.

It also has a slightly odd, rubberised surface finish profiled like house-siding and not the hard metallic crisp edges of its predecessor.

One side has the Samsung logo stencilled onto the rubber, and on the other, in a tiny font, is the ‘T7 Shield’ branding. The capacity of the drive and all the other standards logos are on a narrow elliptical endplate.

The opposing end has a USB-C port and a tiny LED to show power and activity.

Along with the drive, Samsung includes in the box two USB cables that cover both USB-C and Type-A connections, though they don’t provide a fabric pouch for the drive or the cables – though you likely don’t need one anyway.

If the rubberised finish hasn’t provided a sufficient clue, the subtle change from the original T7 to the T7 Shield is that the enclosure has better protection for the SSD electronics inside, allowing the owner to exercise much less restraint when throwing it to his colleague on the other side of the office.

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