SAMSUNG T7 Portable SSD, 2TB External Solid State Drive, Speeds Up to 1,050MB/s, USB 3.2 Gen 2, Reliable Storage for Gaming, Students, Professionals, MU-PC2T0T/AM, Gray

I’m not the most tech savvy and wanted backup on an external drive for graphics heavy work and photos. I remember the challenge of making my last external drive compatible and especially deleting old files, so I was a little anxious trying to find a solution.In case it helps someone else, I work primarily on an iPad Pro in a design program (Affinity) and needed a backup storage solution besides the Cloud. I didn’t really want a second cloud solution to be backup and can’t use an external drive with the iPad. I also have a MacBook, which has massive storage, but can’t be backed up to ICloud, while the ipad can backup to iCloud. My workaround for immediate file saving is to create shared files which are stored on iCloud (I call them Desktop) on the ipad. Desktop is stored on the hard drive of the MacBook and gets updated via ICloud device sharing even though I can’t initiate an iCloud backup from the MacBook.Inside Desktop I have labeled files as usual and a parent file for graphic design from the Ipad, broken down into 100+ named project files and sub files. Whenever I save from the ipad, I save to Desktop (in iCloud) and then choose the appropriate file within Desktop to save. This way I have the folders on the hard drive of the MacBook as interim backup, and am working around not having iCloud backup storage available when I’m on the MacBook. The T7 comes in as secure and portable physical data storage.The T7 drive is the hard copy backup of the files shared between the iPad and MacBook, I think necessary in case of some dreadful software issue, fire, or other unanticipated loss of access. I plan to have more than one as soon as I can afford it, to rotate.Again hopefully this may help someone like me who spent some solid hours figuring out a better way to secure my data and workaround the Mac user experience.Since I am wanted to do manual backups I needed the process to be easy so I wouldn’t avoid doing them, for obvious reasons. Though we don’t need to get into it here I don’t want to use Time Machine on my Mac to back up the disk. So I had to figure out something else.The T7 is great, easy to use, no time at all to install, self explanatory pretty much. I dragged folders full of work from the desktop (yes I like to see them, don’t judge) to backup. The initial backup was very quick and painless, most files were a few seconds. The graphics heavy files perhaps took about 10 minutes? These are massive, not a problem, and may have been quicker than this, I expected it to take more time. (My last iCloud backup was over 13 hours of anxiety - I kid you not and have since deleted almost all the working files from the drawing app after saving them in Desktop so they happen more quickly now, but still, I thought this was a daylong project).I experimented with dragging an old file to the trash from the T7 disk pane, and it worked as expected. I had to read online about how to go about copying my photos library (Mac) to disk, but it wasn’t hard. I have over 40,000 images, and it took about 20 minutes as I recall, if longer probably max 25. I tested the backup by remaining in the open pane and opening the photo files, which worked. Amazingly all this data barely touches the capacity of the drive, maybe 10% or less of a TB? Minuscule, anyway. 2 TB is overkill for me, especially since old files can easily be deleted.(This may be different for a user in Time Machine because it keeps multiple versions of your backups, and maybe more settings etc. which can take up a lot of space?- not tech savvy, as I said, but I had trouble with my older system and Time Machine and being unable to delete backups which rendered my backup disk unusable, and I didn’t want to deal with this again even though it’s less convenient to do it manually).I think the T7 drive will fail before I need more space, which is a great problem to have. I’m planning to get another disk (with less storage) and use it as a failsafe backup- ideally storing it in a safe or out of the house just in case, and keeping a rotation to protect against loss.On the critical end, I’d love it and think it would be much safer for data if the user pane of the T7 was visibly different from the one on my desktop. It’s the same color, font, everything, as my desktop window (maybe that’s just how these things work?), which makes me triple check when I’m deleting or updating. Don’t do this on a Friday night after an adult beverage….I’d also love it if there was a simple tutorial available when you opened the disk up, just for ease of first use, a how to (experimented with a throwaway file deleting because it wasn’t obvious that dragging files to the trash would work) for most, and as a reminder for others. I hesitate getting one for my parents because of this. But I’m happy and will buy another, looking forward to the peace of mind it gives me.

I interact with portable drives daily. I move TBs worth of data around every week onto a variety of devices. When I'm asked, these T7 drives are always on my recommended list. I've seen about 40 of them and we haven't seen one fail yet. Even when we had an issue with one, we were able to use the provided software to get it up and running without data loss.Transfer speeds are as advertised. If you are carrying a drive around on your person or in a car, I'd recommend the shield version of these drives especially if you can catch a sale. These aren't the cheapest drives out there, but they're very reliable in my experience. We have a few of these that are over 5 years old without issues.

I love this SSD. I am not very technologically savvy, but this is very simple to use. I am an artist and record long process videos on my phone. Even though I have a 1 TB iPhone, these videos eventually end up taking up too much space so I use this SSD to offload large video files directly from my iPhone. It makes transferring large files extremely fast and allows me to free up precious storage space on my phone. There's also a way to record videos directly onto the SSD, but I have not used that feature since it is not compatible with the video editing apps I use like InShot (InShot does not allow you to access files from anywhere but your Photo library, so you cannot pull from the SSD directly).

This is a really nice, thin SSD drive.I'd tried all kinds of thumb drives and SSD drives in my new 2025 Tesla Model 3, but none worked. To be fair, I was preparing the drives incorrectly and they would probably have worked fine, had i prepared then correctly... But I got this one to work easily. Here are the steps:1. Delete the partition on the new drive.2. Create two new simple partitions on the new drive: Calculate how much space you'll need for your music (I have 12GB of music, so I figured a 50GB partition will be enough for now) -- this will be the SECOND partition you make. Create your first simple partition and adjust the size by subtracting the number of gigabytes you calculated for your music. Change it to exFAT, and use the volume name "TESLADRIVE". Let Windows do a quick format. Now create your second partition.. it'll default to the size you calculated earlier. Make sure it's formatted as exFAT. Name the volume "MUSIC".3. Create a folder in the first, "TESLADRIVE" partition called "TeslaCam".4. Copy your music to the second, "MUSIC" partition.5. Safely eject and remove the drive from the Windows computer and connect it to the USB port in the glove compartment. This is the only USB drive that supports data transfer. You can use the USB adapter cable that came with the drive.After doing all of this, you'll see a "USB" icon at the bottom of your Model 3's screen, where the apps are. You can now click that icon to play music from the USB drive.DO NOT FORMAT THE USB DRIVE USING THE MODEL 3'S TOUCH SCREEN INTERFACE! Doing so will delete both partitions and you'll have to go through the whole process again!

I work in IT. I have seen hundreds of these and I am not aware of any issues in general. Some people don't know how to format them, they drop them in water, and then blame the device. I bought this one for personal use, and just like all the others, it works great. Read / write speed is excellent, and as advertised. Remember that transfer speed is dependent on file size and other factors, so don't expect 1000 MB/s with a giant folder full of small files; blame your OS for that.