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Adata Urban Tapsafe 2TB review: Solid-state storage you unlock with your phone
Adata's Urban Tapsafe brings unique features like NFC-based drive unlocking via your phone and an app, plus the ability to selectively share drive access with up to nine others. A metal clip and magnetic face plates help the drive stand out, too.
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Perhaps as a result of AI hyperscaler demand soaking up all the cutting-edge flash, external storage makers in recent months have seemed to focus less on speed and more on adding unique and helpful features. We saw this with Sharge's Disk Pro and its built-in hub, Orico's Book Drive P10 Plus and its 100W passthrough charging and MagSafe-compatible back. Adata seems to be playing a similar game with its latest drive, the Urban Tapsafe.
The Urban Tapsafe external SSD is quite compact, about the size of a lighter at 2.70 x 1.42 x 0.76 inches, while making space for a built-in clip, NFC support for automatic locking and unlocking of your data with your phone (if you install the requisite app), and even magnetic swappable front plates. Under the hood, it's a fairly typical 20 Gbps drive with performance that's generally fine. But if you need something small and prefer a clip to a magnet for keeping the drive where you need it, it's worth considering. It also ships with a long five-year warranty, compared to the 2-3 years offered by many other drives in this class.
2.70 x 1.42 x 0.76 inches / 68.68 x 36.18 x 19.18 mm
2.70 x 1.42 x 0.76 inches / 68.68 x 36.18 x 19.18 mm
The Urban Tapsafe stands out in terms of design, in part due to its magnetic face plates that snap onto the frame. The company includes both a black plate and one with a color-shifting surface that looks silver, gray, or a light metallic purple, depending on lighting and the angle you look at it from.
And it's not just about the pretty faceplates. The silver metal chassis feels extremely solid and sports a clip with a strong grip, aided by ridged silicone pads on both sides of the opening. This makes the drive easy to clip onto a pocket, your bag, or video rigs. The limiting factor here is that the clip only opens about half an inch, so it won't clip on to anything bulky.
Despite its plethora of design flourishes and features, the Tapsafe is also pretty small, at 2.3 inches long and 0.72 inches thick. Its metal frame means it's not the lightest drive, at 2.56 ounces, but it's obviously not going to weigh you down.
Of course, the Tapsafe drive's main selling point is the ability to unlock the drive via NFC. This is done via the Urban Tapsafe app, which Adata offers for both Android and iOS. And far from just having simple unlock capabilities, it also lets you give access to multiple users, as well as stipulate whether they are limited to read-only or read-and-write access. The app is fairly simple, but everything worked more or less as expected during my time testing the drive.