Samsung Portable SSD T7

All good .. and looks good too – The Samsung Portable SSD T7 (2TB) comes as a colourful, svelte package. It has the same width and depth as a credit card, but a bit thicker. It comes in impressive (over)packaging. It comes with two cables, thus allowing it to connect to either USB-A or USB-C ports. The instruction manual requires a strong magnifying glass to read. As below, it is… Read more ·  1

a genuine 2TB capacity (the slightly lower number shown in the attached image is due to the space taken up by formatting). As per the image, its read/write speed is at least 300MB/sec on my elderly laptop, so its claimed speed of three times that is quite possible.

Background …

I bought the 2TB Samsung T7, based on the coming together of multiple factors.

I’m finally upgrading from my elderly 17” laptop to a smaller 13” one, which comes with only a small (for Windows) internal SSD (and USB-C/Thunderbolt ports). I have a Thunderbolt hub to connect to a larger monitor, so it made sense to buy a high-capacity external drive to move the data across then leave hooked into the hub. The T7 started appearing in my searches from a number of sites, with significant discounting having finally started (maybe a T8 is on the way?).

Samsung is a reputable brand (with a couple of exceptions – but the all brands seem to have their disasters). I found a heavily discounted one on eBay from a site with lots of positive reviews. So (belt-and-braces) I ordered it from eBay via PayPal in the knowledge that both had repaid me in the past for failed transactions.

Checking for fake?

There are numerous high-capacity drives supposedly available cheaper from eBay, Amazon etc. There are also lots of horror stories of beautifully designed and packaged fakes. Apparently the fakes includes a small’ish (say 64GB) chip and circuitry that lies abut its size, overwrites anything beyond the chip’s size while maintaining a directory claiming to still have the files. So the fake is going to appear to work correctly as a genuine 2TB SSD for Windows File Explorer or similar tools.

To check that I did have a genuine 2TB, I downloaded a free utility H2testw. This works by filling the drive with 1MB files then reading them back, confirming that each is the same file that it wrote.