Flagship PSSD Gets IP65 Avatar

Samsung’s lineup of portable SSDs has been very successful, starting with the T1 in 2015. The company regularly updates its PSSD lineup with the evolution of various high-speed interfaces and NAND flash technology.

Earlier this year, Samsung launched the Portable SSD T7 Shield, a follow-up to the Portable SSD T7 (Touch) introduced in early 2020. Samsung mainly advertises the durability / IP65 rating of the T7 Shield as a selling point over regular portables SSD T7 and T7 Touch. In today’s review, we’ll discuss the performance and value proposition of the Portable SSD T7 Shield. A detailed analysis in the review below reveals another trick Samsung is raising its sleeves. This makes the T7Shield a valuable successor (rather than just an addition) to the Portable SSD T7 family.

Introduction and impression of the product

External bus-powered storage devices capable of performance above 1GBps have become entry-level products on the market today. Rapid advances in flash technology (including the advent of 3D NAND and NVMe) and faster host interfaces (such as Thunderbolt 3 and USB 3.2 Gen 2+) have become key enablers. Broadly speaking, there are five different performance levels in this market.

• 2GBps or larger drive with Thunderbolt 3 or USB 4 using NVMe SSD
• 2GB ps drive with USB 3.2 Gen2x2 using NVMe SSD or Direct USB Flash Drive (UFD) controller
• 1GB ps drive with USB 3.2 Gen2 using NVMe SSD or direct UFD controller
• 500MBps drive with USB 3.2 Gen 1 (or Gen 2 in some cases) using SATA SSD
• USB 3.2 Gen1 sub 400MB ps drive with UFD controller

The Samsung Portable SSD T7 Shield What we are looking at today utilizes the NVMe SSD behind the ASMedia ASM2362 bridge chip and belongs to the third category in the above list. The configuration is very similar to the portable SSD T7 (touch) in terms of NVMe controller and bridge chip. There are several industrial design updates to protect the drive from dust ingress and water splashes (IP65) and to give it an element of sturdiness. The striking look is the addition of an elastomer cover (available in beige, blue and black) to the metal case inside. The new casing also has several ridges that cross the long sides.

Samsung includes two separate cables. One is USB Type-C to Type-A, and the other is Type-C to Type-C of about the same length. Disassembling the unit is fairly easy after removing the four screws hidden under the product label stickers on both sides and removing the elastomer cover. This reveals a metal housing made of aluminum. After removing the piece of plastic on the other side of the end of the connector, you can slide the plastic tray holding the actual SSD board. There are grommets around both plastic end pieces to ensure a good seal and contribute to the IP65 rating. The main board is secured to the plastic tray with four small screws. The connector on the main board has a red sealing band to prevent it from becoming an entry point for external materials.

The complete teardown gallery is also displayed above. This indicates that one side of the board is covered with a thermal pad, even though there are no components on one side of the board. If you remove the thermal pad on the other side, you will see the controller and flash package. The SSD controller is S4LR033 and the ASMedia ASM2362 bridge chip is right next to it. The SSD subsystem of the PSSD T7 Shield is DRAM-free and is almost the same as the T7 Touch subsystem, except for the flash package. The two flash chips on the board are tagged with the K9DVGB8J1B (as opposed to the PSSD T7 Touch sample K9DVGY8J5A). This part number is decoded as TLC, 6th Generation V-NAND (128L / 136T), 512Gbits per die, 16 dies, 1TB for the entire package. This is the same NAND package used on the Samsung 870 EVO SATA SSD.

Samsung claims that the transition from the T7 Touch’s 5th generation 92L (96T) V-NAND to the 6th generation 128L (136T) V-NAND will increase latency by 10% and reduce power consumption by 15%. As we will discuss in more detail in this review, the various assessment results reveal these aspects.

This review compares the Samsung Portable SSD T7 Shield 2TB with other 2TB drives previously reviewed using the latest direct-attached storage test suite. I also added the Samsung Portable SSD T7 Touch 1TB to the mix, but it’s not a comparison between apples. Below is a list of PSSDs considered in this review.

• Samsung T7 Shield 2TB
• SanDisk Professional G-DRIVE 2TB
• SanDisk Professional G-DRIVE ArmorLock 2TB
• Kingston XS2000 2TB
• Samsung T7 Touch 1TB

An overview of the internal features of the storage device is provided by CrystalDiskInfo. The Samsung PSSD T7 Shield, along with TRIM, supports full SMART passthrough, ensuring consistent performance throughout the life of the drive.

SMART Passthrough-CrystalDiskInfo
Samsung T7 Shield 2TBSDPG drive 2TBSDP G-DRIVE ArmorLock 2TBKingston XS2000 2TBSamsung T7 Touch 1TB	SDPG drive 2TBSDP G-DRIVE ArmorLock 2TBKingston XS2000 2TBSamsung T7 Touch 1TBSamsung T7 Shield 2TB

The table below shows a comparison of the various portable SSD specifications presented in this review.

Before we look at benchmark numbers, power consumption, and the effectiveness of our thermal solutions, we’ll show you how to set up and evaluate your testbed.

Testbed setup and evaluation methodology

Directly connected storage devices (including portable SSDs) are evaluated using the Quartz Canyon NUC (basically the Xeon / ECC version of the Ghost Canyon NUC). 2x 16GB DDR4-2667 ECC SODIMM And PCIe 3.0×4 NVMe SSD- IM2P33E8 1TB From ADATA.

The most attractive aspect of the Quartz Canyon NUC is the presence of two PCIe slots (electrically x16 and x4) for add-in cards. If you don’t have a discrete GPU (not required for DAS testbeds), you can use both slots. In fact, to avoid the DMI bottleneck when evaluating Thunderbolt 3 devices, we also added a spare SanDisk Extreme PRO M.2 NVMe SSD to the CPU direct connection M.222110 slot on the baseboard. This allows you to continue to use two add-in cards that operate at x8 (x16 electricity) and x4 (x4 electricity). QuartzCanyonNUC doesn’t have a native USB 3.2 Gen 2×2 port, so Silverstone SST-ECU06 The add-in card is installed in the x4 slot. All devices except Thunderbolt are tested using the Type-C port enabled by SST-ECU06.

The testbed specifications are summarized in the table below.

Testbed hardware is just one segment of the rating. Over the last few years, common direct-attached storage workloads for memory cards have also evolved. High bitrate 4K video at 60fps has become very popular and 8K video is beginning to emerge. Game install sizes are also steadily growing on portable game consoles, thanks to high resolution textures and artwork. With these in mind, the direct-attached storage device evaluation scheme includes multiple workloads detailed in the corresponding sections.

• Synthetic workload using CrystalDiskMark and ATTO
• Actual access trace using PCMark 10 storage benchmark
• A custom robocopy workload that reflects typical DAS usage
• Sequential writing stress test

The next section gives an overview of Samsung Portable SSD T7Shield’s performance on these benchmarks. Before making any conclusions, we also observed some PSSD power consumption and thermal solutions.