Product: 2TB Samsung Non-touch Blue Colour Portable SSD The T7 came in a nicely sealed box. I was quite surprised that the product was manufactured in South Korea. The box includes 2 USB cables, one manual, and the T7 device. It comes with 1 USB-C to USB-C cable, capable of delivering up to 10Gbps, and a USB-C to USB 3 cable. Both cables are about 40 cm long and the construction is very well built. I have no doubt they will last many years unless I exert some great physical abuse. Both cables fit very snuggly in the T7 body. Even if you are the type of person who likes to hang the SSD in the mid-air, I am certain that the device won't fall off unless you intentionally pull it off. The device is very light. According to Samsung, T7 only weight 58 grams. It is a size of a credit card and about the same thickness of an iPhone 8. The SSD is enclosed in a solid metal body. I believe the metal body was used to dissipate heat faster to reduce throttling caused by heat. The main reason why I purchased T7 without the fingerprint sensor is because of the price difference for technology that I will not be using. In order to use the fingerprint sensor, you need to encrypt the device using Samsung's application. The Samsung application will do the hardware encryption, which was notoriously known for its vulnerability to attackers. I am sure that Samsung fixed this bypass but I will stick to the more secure APFS encryption. I had some trouble installing the Samsung application on my Mac. When I launched the application, the software was not able to recognize my SSD. After many troubleshooting, I found out the Samsung SSD had to be formatted in APFS (non-encrypted) file system in order to be recognized. After formatting, I was able to do the hardware encryption with the application. The performance of the device was solid. When hardware encrypted, it had no performance hit compared to having no encryption. However, after using the device for 30 minutes, I have noticed some degradation in performance due to throttling caused by heat. On average, it was hitting 890MB write and 900MB read speed. With some throttling, this number went down to 850MB wite but still respectable 900MB read speed. With Apple's APFS Encryption, the performance had about 20 to 23 percent hit. Compared to my SanDisk Extreme SSD, the device is slightly cooler to touch. Form factors are about same, where SanDisk is slightly longer but narrower compared to Samsung T7. Overall, given the robust construction, solid performance, and small form factor, I am giving it 5 stars.
