Wondering if they seamlessly support Apple's Time Machine for backing up... anyone know from experience?
Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
Samsung's T7 Portable SSD Now Available for Purchase
- Thread starter MacRumors
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
Instead of starting a new thread, perhaps I can bump this one?
My wife and I each have our own M1 Air's now, little monsters, but because we opted for the 256GB versions, we've had to move all our photo and video libraries onto external drives, a pair of Seagate One Touch 4TB's. They work, but we can pretty much go have breakfast while waiting for some of the Photo libraries to open.
So my question is, who here has experience using a Photos library bigger than 700GB and containing more than 105k images, lots of them RAW, on a Samsung T7 and an M1 machine?
I would also not bother with a dongle when using such a drive as you can connect directly with USB-C.
Interestingly enough, an iMovie library of some 700GB and mostly 1080HD or less isn't running too bad on the Seagate HDD, but Photos is practically unusable.
I'm also thinking to go straight for the T7 and not bother with the T5, as the price difference isn't that big whereas the speed is double. I can get a T7-2TB on Amazon for €277. I paid a paltry €90 for the Seagate 4TB.
And here I am old enough to remember how long it took to save a one page plain text document with Lotus 1 2 3 on a 6" floppy disk...
My wife and I each have our own M1 Air's now, little monsters, but because we opted for the 256GB versions, we've had to move all our photo and video libraries onto external drives, a pair of Seagate One Touch 4TB's. They work, but we can pretty much go have breakfast while waiting for some of the Photo libraries to open.
So my question is, who here has experience using a Photos library bigger than 700GB and containing more than 105k images, lots of them RAW, on a Samsung T7 and an M1 machine?
I would also not bother with a dongle when using such a drive as you can connect directly with USB-C.
Interestingly enough, an iMovie library of some 700GB and mostly 1080HD or less isn't running too bad on the Seagate HDD, but Photos is practically unusable.
I'm also thinking to go straight for the T7 and not bother with the T5, as the price difference isn't that big whereas the speed is double. I can get a T7-2TB on Amazon for €277. I paid a paltry €90 for the Seagate 4TB.
And here I am old enough to remember how long it took to save a one page plain text document with Lotus 1 2 3 on a 6" floppy disk...
Last edited:
I’m young enough to have worked with an actual Winchester brand hard drive when loading stuff on the Wang VS wordprcessor my dad had at work when I was a kid. It had the most musical sound of any hard drive I’ve ever heard, almost like a beeping slot machine
Go for the T7!! Faster than the T5 and worth the insignificant extra expenditure. I don't use Photos, I prefer to use another system for editing and organizing my image files, but I do use T7's and Samsung's X5 for temporary storage, archiving, and working on my images and have been doing so for quite some time now, having started back with the T1 years ago. My process is basically to keep the current year's images readily at hand while not on the computer's internal drive and after the year is up, I shift the image files to archival drives, which at this point in time are still on platter/spinner HDDs because of the larger capacity. It's a lot less expensive to buy a 4 TB HDD than it is to buy a 4 TB external SSD! (I do have one of those now, though, a SanDisk Extreme Pro 4 TB Portable SSD which is housing the 2021 images, both processed and RAW files.).
I also use T7s and T5s for backups and supplementary drives to hold data that I don't necessarily need to have on my computer all the time but that I do need to occasionally refer to or modify. I have several sets of backups, and one set goes to my bank safe deposit box (the smaller external SSDs are handy for this), and each month I swap out what's in there with an updated current set, bring home the older set and update it for the next time.
In addition to the machine upon which I do most of my editing, a 2018 MBP, I also have the 13" M1 MBP, but do not do too much editing on that machine. Again, it is convenient if I need to quickly refer to a particular image file or document file to grab one of my external SSDs and plug it into the M1 machine to do what I need.
Definitely go for the T7 -- the difference in speed between it and the T5 is noticeable.
I also use T7s and T5s for backups and supplementary drives to hold data that I don't necessarily need to have on my computer all the time but that I do need to occasionally refer to or modify. I have several sets of backups, and one set goes to my bank safe deposit box (the smaller external SSDs are handy for this), and each month I swap out what's in there with an updated current set, bring home the older set and update it for the next time.
In addition to the machine upon which I do most of my editing, a 2018 MBP, I also have the 13" M1 MBP, but do not do too much editing on that machine. Again, it is convenient if I need to quickly refer to a particular image file or document file to grab one of my external SSDs and plug it into the M1 machine to do what I need.
Definitely go for the T7 -- the difference in speed between it and the T5 is noticeable.
I have a pair of 2TB T7's and they are great. However, I've seen other posts that say the T7 cannot reach full speed on the M1 machines (I get ~840 write/925 read on my 2018 Mini). So that makes me wonder if the T7 is actually any faster than the T5 on an M1?
Yes.. I read an explanation for the speed reduction somewhere but forgot, claimed you could get around it with the right hub...shrugs.. anyway , even with the reduction the t7 is faster than the T5.. and I own several of both. On a M1 MacBook Air and M1 iMac.
Oh, and I run Lightroom classic off of a 2 tb T7 with 61 mp raw files, no problem
Hello folks,
did anybody tested the T7 touch with an ipad air 4 already? Will this also work or is a thunderbolt USB-C connection (which only ipad pro has) required?
did anybody tested the T7 touch with an ipad air 4 already? Will this also work or is a thunderbolt USB-C connection (which only ipad pro has) required?
It doesn't need thunderbolt. USB-C is faster, but it also works with USB-A and a standard cable is included. As to whether it works with an iPad... no idea, but you could plug a lightning to USB-C cable into it and see what what happens. 
The iPad Air 4 is a USB-C iPad (with a port that's limited to 5Gb/sec.) No need for any Lightning or USB-A adapters there.It doesn't need thunderbolt. USB-C is faster, but it also works with USB-A and a standard cable is included. As to whether it works with an iPad... no idea, but you could plug a lightning to USB-C cable into it and see what what happens.
