hey everybody gets Lawnside button we’re taking a look today at a new solid-state drive from Samsung this is their t7 we’ve previously looked at their t5 and the t3 which are the older versions this new one performs better and it has a fingerprint sensor now integrated into the package so you can lock it down and encrypt it and then very easily unlock the drive with just a push of a finger and it seems to be working pretty well so we’re gonna step through this product here in just a second to see how it works and how it performs but I do want to let you know in the interest of full disclosure that I paid for this with my own funds all the opinions you’re about to hear are my own nobody is paying for this review nor is anyone reviewed or approved what you’re about to see before it was uploaded so let’s get into it now and see what this drive is all about so let’s take a closer look now at the hardware there are two versions available there’s a 500 gig version which is the one I have here and there’s also a one terabyte version the 500 gig starts at 129 the terabyte is $100 more there’s also one that you can get in silver with the same capacity and price configuration there it’s made out of metal like the old ones were very nice feeling nice and rugged it’s not waterproof but I think it should be able to survive some moderate levels of abuse while traveling you got the fingerprint sensor here and then ringed around it is an LED light that will give you drive usage indications along with prompts for the fingerprint when you go to read it so that’s pretty nice you’ll see how that works in a second we have a USB type-c port here for connecting it up to your devices now this has a USB gen 2 connector onboard which means you’ll get the best performance on newer computers that have one of those Gen 2 ports you can find out if you’ve got one of those ports in your product specifications or in the computers
manual the good news though is that it will work with just about anything with a USB port and they give you cables for all configurations so you get a USB c2 USBC cable for connecting it up to newer machines that have a USBC connector and you have a USB C to USB a connector here as well so no matter what you got again it should work now if you want to get a longer cable than what it comes with make sure you buy a case that is a Gen 2 compatible cable all these USB C cables look alike but they perform very different so just read very carefully when you shop to get the cable that will get you the best performance if you do want to go longer but again they’ve given you everything in the box here you need to get started and I like that we have two distinct cables here and not some out of spec adapter that we often see these companies providing with their hard drives now out of the box the drive will work like just about any hard drive you plug it in and it mounts on your computer and you’re ready to go but if you wish to use the fingerprint sensor to better secure it you’ll need to install the Samsung
software this runs on Android Mac or Windows and when you get that software installed you can set up a password to encrypt it and you have the option of also getting a fingerprint going and as you can see here the software was reading my fingerprint through the drive it stores everything on the drive though so you can get it going on a computer without the software installed later and I’ll show you that in a second it’ll store up to four fingerprints so you could have four of your own fingers or maybe have some co-workers or other people that you want to authorize use the drive program there’s in and once those fingerprints are programmed you just plug it into a computer and unlock it let’s take a look and see how it works we’re gonna plug it into my Mac here which does not have the Samsung software installed to see what happens all right so we’ve got my Mac here ready to go and remember this Mac has never had any Samsung software installed on it and we’re going to see if we can unlock it with my fingerprint and use it so I’m gonna plug in the drive here real quick and what’s going to happen is we are going to actually see the drive mount but we’re not getting at my files here this is a read-only partition that Samsung uses to let people install software if they need to and the reason why it has some software here is that if you opted not to use the fingerprint and just use a password you’ll need to have some software to type the password in so the drive can unlock but if you use the fingerprint option you don’t need the software so if we just go back to my hard drive here so our window doesn’t go away I’m going to go and just tap my finger on top of the hard drive here
you can see it lit up blue and now it’s going to do its thing and now it looks like we are unlocked and check it out if we go over here to keep out which is the actual name of the drive I can now access some photos that I put on here earlier so I’ve got me with our rocket and I’ve got some other stuff here and that was all safely secured and encrypted on the drive until I used my fingerprint to unlock it and then of course if we eject that drive we can go back to where we were before let’s try out a few fingerprints that I didn’t register to see if it keeps us out all right so we’re reset the drive and you can see we’re back on having that read-only partition again and if I maybe put my pinkie down here which I didn’t register you can see that it’s going to read it but it’s going to blink at us to indicate that that finger is not working I’ll take another finger out here and try that one and see if it will let me in with that again we’ve got more blinking but if I go over to a finger that I know I’ve registered with the drive here and put it down there you’ll see that it very quickly unlocks the drive and gives us our keep out partition once again so to recap here the drive is not encrypted when you buy it so if your intention is just to use it as a hard drive plug it into whatever you want it’s just gonna work if you want to encrypt it and lock it down with a password and a fingerprint you then need to install the software on one
machine only to get it going once those fingerprints and passwords are set up you can plug it into anything without software and unlock it with the fingerprint if you want to unlock it with passwords you will need software now I did install the software on my Windows computer here to get those fingerprints set up initially and I was annoyed that the software stays persistent even when you’re done with it so I just plugged the drive in here as you can see we got the little read-only partition showing up here and look what’s going on behind it it’s got the Samsung software here prompting me to touch it with my finger to unlock the partition which it just did but that software is always running in the background even after a reboot it’s unnecessary because we need the software every time to unlock the drive yet it is there the one thing you do get is the ability to update its firmware if there is a firmware update available but I don’t think there’s any need for this software to be running after you get the encryption setup and I hope that they might make some adjustments or give the user some options to have it not run in the background I just don’t like having things running in the background of my computer and right now this is always running unless I uninstall the software if I uninstall the software no impact on the drive I could easily just reinstall it later and go back in and change things from
there but you do have the ability to change the fingerprints here and change the password or turn off the encryption completely here with the software so it’s pretty easy to use not many features to it but it’s annoyingly persistent and I don’t believe it should be persistent at all now I tried it on a bunch of other devices didn’t have any issues with it even with the fingerprint unlocking one note of caution though on Android I have two Android phones they’re both Google pixel phones and they don’t read exFAT over USB at least my two don’t so the drive worked but the phones wanted to format it into a compatible file system which of course would erase my partition so if you have some issues with Android you might need to format the drive to be compatible but everything else has been fine as I’ve been plugging it into other devices I was even able to get it to work here with my iPad pro and by extension this should also work with other iPads and iPhones with the lightning to USB connector so when I connect it up here as you can see we have that read-only partition here accessible to us and then if I go ahead and validate my fingerprint it will then switch us over to the other readable and writable partition my keep-out partition here and there we’ve got the photos that we were looking at on the computer so it seems to work just fine again without any software needed to unlock
across other devices so let’s take a look now at performance and this is the Blackmagic speed test running on my macbook pro and you can see out of the gate here for its sequential read and write testing here we’re getting about 822 megabytes per second on rights and about 885 or so on reads now note though that once you go back and forth on this test over time it’ll slow down a little bit on the rights so I think the realistic expectation here for sequential writing for video capturing and copying files and whatnot should be about 800 megabytes per second however I’m not seeing any decline in performance when using the encryption versus not using the encryption so it looks like whatever they’re doing to encrypt here is not going to impact your performance at all and although this is not the fastest SSD out on the market it’s really very consistent in its performance it hadn’t really dipped below what you’re seeing there over a very long period of time running this test and I think that’s often more important sometimes than a super-fast drive that will slow down after 30 seconds or a minute of having data written to it so you’re gonna see a lot of these nvm e drives out there that are coming down in price and advertised really fast speeds in fact Samsung has a thunderbolt version of their x5 SSD line that will deliver some really crazy speeds but once that drive heats up and those caches fill up they slowed down dramatically so this one throughout all of my testing
was staying again very consistent throughout those reads and writes of sequential data so very impressed here because it’s performing well better than the old drives and it’s performing consistently which is very important and we also ran the crystal disk mark test to get a feel for how it did not only with its sequential reads and writes but also random reads and writes you can see those random reads and writes below the sequential test there at the top and it performed okay and on par with other SSDs that are out there this is where the nvme SSDs tend to do a little bit better so if you are looking at doing game playing or loading an operating system or something where you’re constantly randomly hitting the drive with stuff I think you might do a little bit better with one of those versus this one but this one does have the advantage in being more consistent in its sequential reads and writes so that’s going to do it for this look at the Samsung t7 I really like what they’ve put together here because the fingerprint sensor is not a gimmick it’s a differentiating feature from the multitude of SSD choices that are out there on the market it works really well it’s super fast and what’s interesting is that it is convenient oftentimes when we talk about securing our data and encrypting it we’re adding inconvenience to provide that layer of protection here it’s very convenient to use it and I think that’s something that they’ve executed quite well here just plug it in without any software tapped a fingerprint reader and you’re in if you happen to lose the drive and somebody picks it up they’re not getting in because they don’t have your fingerprint or a password and they’ve done a really good job here getting
that feature integrated in hardware into this device and I think if you’re looking for something to easily secure your data but want the performance that an SSD can provide this is going to be a good choice and I think they’ve put together a really nice product here I do hope they get rid of some of that persistence in their software maybe in a few months when you’re watching this video they’ll have done that and I’ll put a comment down below to update the video but beyond that I can’t find much to complain about here really nice consistent performance again there are faster SSDs out there but those faster ones are not as consistent and this does offer a nice improvement in performance over its predecessors so that’s going to do it now for the samsung t7 let me know what you think down in the comments below and until next time this is LAN Simon thanks for watching this channel is brought to you by the lon TV supporters including gold level supporters the four guys with quarters podcasts Tom Albrecht rajesh logic gr in cali an kumar if you want to help the channel you can by contributing as little as a dollar a month at over two lon TV slash support to learn more and don’t forget to subscribe
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