Samsung T7 Touch Review: Protect your portable data with your fingerprint

Announced at CES just a couple of months ago, the idea of a portable hard drive that you unlock with your fingerprint is really quite cool – but now having used it, I can tell you it’s more than cool – it’s bloody useful.

The T7 Touch from Samsung is a small portable hard drive that has one key feature most don’t – security.

While it looks the same as many of Samsung’s other small SSD hard drive, there’s a square on the top of this unit that lights up when plugged in – that’s a fingerprint sensor.

Simply tap your fingerprint on there and the drive unlocks and all our files are visible on the connected computer or smartphone.

Setup was way easier than I thought – the software is on the drive, simply run it, then name your drive, and scan your fingerprint as you do on a smartphone.

A password is also required for backup protection, but you’ll only ever use your fingerprint I’m sure of that.

When you connect the drive to a device and don’t scan your fingerprint it shows up, but no files are visible.

Scan your fingerprint and boom – there are your files. I love it.

It’s not cheap – 500GB version is $279, the 1TB is $439 and 2TB is $799.

For complete security of your files, it doesn’t come much better.

However, the product could be improved. Imagine there was a folder on there when unlocked that you could drop files and those files were visible in the “read-only” state when the drive has not been fingerprint unlocked.

This way you can share files with ease. I couldn’t find a way to do that either mucking around or in the user manual.

Otherwise, it’s great. Solid security for those out and on the go who worry about leaving a hard drive behind.