on Sep 11th, 2026,

The ADATA Urban Tapsafe is a premium portable SSD designed to offer fast and secure storage to professionals on the move, as well as amateur content creators looking for a reliable storage medium to tie to their iPhone-based camera rigs. The drive comes in 1 TB and 2 TB capacities, and in this review, we take a look at the latter. Unique to this drive is an NFC-based drive unlocking mechanism with which you can use your smartphone to unlock and access-control the drive. When set up correctly, the drive won't expose its contents to the PC or host device until you pull up an ADATA-provided app on your smartphone, and tap the drive's NFC tag. Only then will the drive expose its volumes to the host.

The Urban Tapsafe features a very premium appearance, and a solid build quality, with a sturdy metallic polycarbonate body, with magnetically attaching top-plates. One of them looks metallic black, and the other is iridescent. The drive is also surprisingly solid and chunky to hold, weighing 72 g. It features a 20 Gbps USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 host interface, and ADATA advertises sequential transfer speeds of up to 1900 MB/s, nearly maxing out the interface. The drive is also recommended as a game install drive for modern game consoles, such as PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S.

The Urban Tapsafe also comes with a sturdy, captive clip that lets you attach it to camera rigs without needing a cold shoe—these would be the kind of rigs that have iPhones suspended on gimbals, with provisions for microphone, a portable SSD, and a power bank, with are popular with YouTube and Twitch content creators. ADATA is also offering a segment-leading five-year product warranty with the Urban Tapsafe. The 2 TB version that we're reviewing today is priced at an eye-watering $391, but this is mainly due to the haywire pricing in NAND flash memory.