Samsung taking a lesson from Lacie?

Samsung has just announced a revision of their popular T7 SSD. The new T7 Shield offers IP65 rating for dust and water resistance. It's also clad in a rubber protective jacket similar to Lacie's offerings in their "rugged" line. It's offered in blue, beige and black with 1TB and 2TB capacities being available. (would still love to see a 4TB offered in this form factor)

In the past I've written about how the original T7 isn't the best choice when it comes to performance. If you missed that you can read it here.

Looking at the T7 shield it would seem as though they just ruggedized it with the rubber cover. But upon closer inspection it's got a thicker aluminum housing that allows for better thermal management and the rubber jacket helps keep the external temp within threshold for what's safe to handle. Samsung is also using their new 128-layer NAND flash as opposed the 92-layer in previous models.

I was curious about whether the T7 Shield chocked in sustained write due to small cache like it's predecessor.  So I checked out Tom's Hardware to see their stats from testing. And what do you know? The T7 Shield no longer chokes after 24GB and is able to keep a respectable write speed.

Chart from Tom's Hardware.

While others drives on the market outperform it in some tasks it's certainly a performance upgrade over the original T7. It now keeps up with the Lacie Rugged SSD. It's certainly not just a cosmetic update to an old model. Samsung does use it's Dynamic Thermal Guard (DTG) technology, which prevents overheating by maintaining the drive’s optimal working temperature below 57°C by adjusting the drive’s speed. I assume this has been tuned for the T7 Shield's physical changes. It now seems worthy of having on set. And, while SSDs are already quite durable, the physical enhancements seen here can give you a bit more comfort about your data being safe. That is, as with any data, as long as you've also got another copy in another location! 

Maybe Samsung will offer one in orange?