@variablepulserate Four years ago I bought a Samsung T5 250 GB external SSD with the same two cables you mention. This type was not the fingerprint one that you have.
When first mounted I noticed the device was prone to being too easily disconnected from the MacBook Pro I used it with. Fiddling about revealled one USB-C end of the cable would attach more firmly to the Thunderbolt port than the otherf end would, so i labelled the two ends as Mac & SSD.
Now the security aspects of the drive had to be sorted, On initial connection a small partition was mounted, once its password was entered, that partition would unmount & the larger partition with the rest of the drive would then mount.
This was excessive to my needs, I soon worked out how to set it to forget about the securirt/startup partition.
Then after some months, I reformatted the drive, thus disposing of that partition altoghther.
It doesn’t seem to mind which double-ended USB-C cable is used to connect it, it just works.