CES 2020: Samsung, SanDisk announce new innovative portable SSDs

With portable SSDs (solid-state drives) gradually gaining more popularity amongst hard drives in the portable storage devices market, we’re beginning to see some more innovation creep into this space. Samsung, for example, announced at CES 2020, a new portable SSD with a fingerprint reader integrated into its enclosure for added security. SanDisk, on the other hand, showed off its most capacious portable SSD yet, which boasts 8TB of storage space. SanDisk also announced a USB-C flash drive with 1TB of storage space on board as well.

Samsung T7 Touch

Samsung’s new SSD is called the T7 Touch. According to the Korean electronics manufacturer, it features the fastest data transfer speeds currently available, thanks to the USB 3.2 Gen 2 standard. It can deliver a read speed of 1,050MB/s and a write speed of 1,000MB/s, which the company claims is 9.5 times faster than what a typical external hard drive can manage. Resembling a compact card case and weighing 58g, the T7 Touch comes with a tiny square fingerprint reader on the top side of its aluminium enclosure, which works on top of standard password protection and AES 256-bit hardware encryption.

Samsung says its T7 Touch SSD is compatible with Windows, Mac, and Android devices alike, which means it will work with compatible Android smartphones. The drive comes with a USB-C-to-C and a USB-A-to-C cable. One will have to use the bundled Samsung Portable SSD Software 1.0 to enable fingerprint-based protection. The SSD sports a ‘Motion LED’ around the fingerprint reader to show drive status. Available from this month on in over 30 countries in black and silver colour options, the Samsung T7 Touch comes in 500GB, 1TB, and 2TB capacities at a starting price of $129.99 (Rs 8,965 approx).

SanDisk 8TB SSD Prototype, Ultra Dual Drive Luxe USB Type-C

SanDisk’s parent company Western Digital showcased a number of new storage devices at CES this year but the most notable of them is the new SanDisk 8TB SSD prototype. It looks and feels like any other SanDisk portable SSD but it sports 8TB of storage space on board, which is the highest capacity available on any portable SSD in the world so far. To give you some perspective, SanDisk’s current crop of portable SSDs—the SanDisk Extreme and SanDisk Extreme Pro—tops out at a maximum capacity of 2TB. Unfortunately, SanDisk is not ready to release its new 8TB SSD prototype in the market just yet.

SanDisk also announced at CES 2020, a 1TB variant of its USB-C flash drive, the SanDisk Ultra Dual Drive Luxe USB Type-C. As the name suggests, the drive has a USB-C connector on one end and a USB-A connector on the other. This makes it compatible with smartphones and PCs alike. A pivoting metal cap protects one of the two ports at any given time. The flash drive employs the USB 3.1 standard, which means you can expect a sequential read speed of up to 150MB/s. The SanDisk Ultra Dual Drive Luxe USB Type-C with 1TB of storage capacity is currently on sale and costs $249.99 (Rs 17,240 approx).

Cover, Inline Image Courtesy: Engadget, Samsung, Western Digital

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