Samsung's 500GB T7 portable NVMe SSD is down to $59 at Newegg
Use code EMCEYSB59 for 15% off the listed price.
The Samsung T7 is a rather good portable SSD, available in the extra-secure "Touch" version (shown in the photo above) or as the cheaper and equally speedy "vanilla" variant. Today, that plain Jane Samsung T7 has been discounted heavily at Newegg, with the company offering a 500GB capacity drive for just $59.50. That's well below the original $100 asking price of the drive, and makes for a great deal against more expensive competition like the Crucial X8.
Katharine reviewed the touch version of the Samsung T7 last January, where she rated the drive highly in terms of performance and portability, but lambasted its fiddly fingerprint reader and high price. The touchless T7, as featured here, solves both of those problems rather nicely, especially at its new discounted price.
In testing, the T7 provided 866MB/s read speeds and 856MB/s write speeds over USB-C, pretty close to the advertised 1000MB/s maximums. (I also happened to take a look at the T7 for Digital Foundry, and saw read speeds of around 910MB/s - so clearly the equipment you're running the test on will influence the results slightly.)
Random read and write speeds weren't much better than a SATA SSD, like the cheaper Samsung T5, but then again that isn't too surprising given how similarly SATA and NVMe SSDs perform in game load time testing. You're really paying for the faster sequential speeds, which can be brilliant if you're often transferring large files such as 4K video, game install directories and so on. (I tend to do this a lot for my work, and having a fast NVMe SSD has quickly become indispensable).
I'd say that if you forsee using the drive for game storage rather than as a workhorse to copy large files around, then it might be worth going for the Samsung T5 instead - but the cheapest price I can see on this is at Amazon, where a 1TB drive is $140, making it slightly more expensive than the T7! The Crucial X6 is another good alternative, and its 1TB price is a little more reasonable - $110. (For more SSD recommendations, check out our best gaming SSDs article.)
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The sale ends on Sunday, so if you're in the market for a fast external drive then you'd best make your move before then. Or don't - I'm not the boss of you, I'm just a deals post.