Samsung T7 Shield 2TB USB Type-C SSD Quick Look

The Samsung T7 Shield is a well-known external SSD at this point. The 10Gbps USB Type-C SSD has been around for quite some time, and it is quite popular. Samsung took its popular T7 drive and added additional rubber outside of the drive for protection, and has made an external SSD designed for fieldwork. Since we have many of these drives, it was time to review them.

We purchase our Samsung T7 Shield drives in 2TB and 4TB capacities from Amazon. You can find our Amazon Affiliate link here.

Some Background

At STH, we have at least a dozen of these T7 Shield SSDs. Usually, when Patrick and the team capture videos on the road, they use these to create backup copies of the footage. We have also been using them to overnight footage to Alex for editing. That is why we use the “Shield” rather than the standard T7 model.

We are also transitioning to filming more in 6K and 8K, and the team has been expanding with more cameras. As a result, the size of an average video project has gone from 100-150GB to 300GB at the low end. Some of our newer cameras use 1TB of storage in ~32min just in 8K if we shoot in ProRes RAW, usually overkill for our applications, but that is a trend in the camera industry. More cameras with higher resolutions have meant that managing the data is becoming a bigger challenge. You may have seen this in the Blackmagic Cloud Pod 10GbE USB SSD Sharing Device piece.

We also showed one of the drives in our Anker 778 Thunderbolt 4 Dock Mini-Review.

We need to buy more drives. So, when I got the question on which drives to buy more of, I decided we needed a quick series on this. As a result, we bought many of the most popular drives we could find. This was supposed to be the first review, but we actually started the series with the Crucial X10 Pro 4TB USB Type-C SSD Review. Still the T7 Shield has been our default, so we wanted to see if it is still the drive to get.

Samsung T7 Shield 2TB Overview

The drives are 59 x 88 x 13mm in size and 98g so they are actually quite large and heavy compared to some of the other options out there. The water and dust rating on these is IP65 so that is a higher rating than the X10 Pro.

The SSD has a USB 3 Gen2 Type-C port, but it comes with both USB Type-A to Type-C and Type-C to Type-C cables.

The 10Gbps drive has a small label on the face opposite the USB port. There we can see the 2TB capacity. This is not the easiest to see compared to some other drives on the market. When you have a single drive, that is not a challenge. When you have several of these in a bag, it can be harder to see.

A small feature, but one that is easily overlooked is that the rubber on the outside of the drive, while making the size larger, offers both protection as well as making the drive easy to grip. We never worry about these drives sliding out of our hands. Also, they tend to stay put well in camera bags.

While the drive itself is straightforward, let us next get to the performance.