I recently acquired a SAMSUNG T7 ssd drive for my local home network (1 user). I am going to use it for common storage, such as sharing files between devices, and maybe even doing some backing up. I am not sure if this is a good idea, but are ssds, and in particular this one, good for this type of task? I am most concerned about the life span of it. Any recommendations on my setup, or advice?

Treat it like any other hdd. Life span should be even longer than a hdd.

I would think the latency inherent in the network would probably significantly negate the speed advantage of an SSD over standard hard drive. You're only as fast as your slowest link in the chain and that will be your network speed. Of course, your writes to and reads from the SSD will be much faster but the data still has to go over your network and that remains the same. You may be disappointed in the speed increase.

As far as lifespan of the drive, that will depend on a lot of things and you're likely to get a variety of opinions. Personally, unless you are doing an inordinate amount of writes to the drive, I feel that the firmware technology for SSDs has matured to the point that an SSD is likely to meet or exceed the lifespan of a mechanical hard drive in most typical home computing scenarios. You may want to "over provision" the drive by partitioning the drive with 10% unallocated as this used to be recommended. The SSD firmware can use the unallocated space to replace bad blocks on the drive due to excessive writes to the block. Over provisioning of an SSD was said to increase its lifespan. However, these days, I believe most SSDs have significant over provisioning built in and you can partition and format the entire drive. You may want to check with Samsung and see what they recommend re over provisioning.

I have 3 external drives connected to my main desktop/NFS server. Two are magnetic spinning drives, one is a newer SSD drive, connected through a Thunderbolt port. I see no real difference in them other than that it takes a few seconds for the magnetic drives to spin up if they've been idle. The SSD is always ready. If used primarily as a storage device with fewer writes and deletions than on a usual desktop drive, I don't think longevity would be a problem at all. Accessing the drive doesn't cause any wear, it's only rewriting individual cells, and that's not likely to be a big issue. The SSD drive should do fine.