Hi. I need to install linux (Manjaro) on an external drive and boot from it. I could go for a safe and conventional option I suppose but Samsung T7 looks very appealing in terms of speed and price.

My concern is, it has a fingerprint reading safety feature and I was wondering if I'd have trouble partitioning or installing on this drive. Has anyone ever tried anything similar with this model?

There's a similar thread about T7 in this forum but it's not very clear.

Any help is appreciated. Thanks in advance.

I haven't tried that particular model, but I've created several USB install sticks. So in general, it should be possible.
The interesting questions are:
- How long does the fingerprint reader take to confirm your fingerprint and grant access to the Laptop/Desktop PC?
- If that time is too long for your PC: Does your PC provide USB power supply when switched off? (So you could do the fingerprint reading before pushing the power button of you PC.)
- Why don't you want to use an internal drive? - You don't want to use that drive to boot two different machines from it, do you? (This should be possible. But I wouldn't recommend it to beginners.)

Well I haven't bought one yet so I can only answer the last question. I'm not using the internal drive because I can't. I have a Lenovo Ideapad 1 11ADA105 which comes with an eMMC drive and linux doesn't recognize it. There are dozens of cases but no solution yet.

I am unfamiliar with the T7 but there is no linux support for this SSD. According to Samsung's FAQs you can only use its security features with Windows or OSX.

I have read the fingerprinting feature is independent of the connected device but then you need the software if connected to a computer.

I would only use it as a regular USB drive so not sure there is any benefit and would look at a T5 instead.