The Samsung T7 Portable SSD 2TB is one of Samsung’s compact external solid state drives, the size of a credit card and small enough to disappear in a jacket pocket while still holding 2 terabytes of files. Transfer speeds reach up to 1,050 MB per second on reads and 1,000 MB per second on writes via USB 3.2 Gen 2, roughly 9 times faster than a typical USB hard drive and around 2 times faster than older SATA-based portable SSDs. The drive’s chassis has an aluminum unibody construction that handles drops up to 6 feet without internal damage, and it’s small enough to slip into a wallet sleeve or a phone case pocket for travel.
A massive 2TB hard drive perfect for adding more storage to your setup
For creative professionals working out of a laptop, the T7 is a useful piece of storage to keep in the laptop bag. You can offload an entire video shoot from a camera’s SD card directly to the drive without ever copying to the laptop’s internal SSD, keeping the system drive clear and the project files portable across multiple machines. The 1,050 MB/s read speed is fast enough to edit 4K and even some 6K timelines directly from the T7 in Final Cut Pro, DaVinci Resolve, or Premiere Pro without proxy media.
The drive is plug-and-play across Windows 10 and 11, macOS, Android phones and tablets, the PS5, the Xbox Series X and S, and most iPads with USB-C. No drivers are needed on any current platform. The drive has a USB-C port on the drive side, with both a USB-C to USB-C cable and a USB-C to USB-A cable included for connecting to older laptops.
Samsung offers its portable SSD software at no cost for both Mac and Windows, with AES 256-bit hardware encryption, password protection, and firmware upgrades. When you first encrypt your drive with the software, each time you connect it to another computer, you will need an additional password, which makes for excellent protection if you have sensitive files you need to take on the go.
The lightweight aluminum design means the drive is only at .31″ thick, which makes the T7 comparable in size to a standard credit card and thinner than a single stack of business cards. Additionally, the aluminum design protects against minor scratches and drops, and Samsung offers a 3-year warranty against defects.
Amazon currently has the Samsung T7 2TB at $400, $150 off its $550 list price. That works out to about 20 cents per gigabyte for portable storage small enough to fit in a pocket, which is the price-per-gigabyte threshold where the speed advantage of flash storage over older mechanical hard drives finally outweighs the higher cost.