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The drive uses 3D NAND which delivers lower power consumption and cheaper prices. It was detected as a SanDisk X600, an M.2 SATA model that features WD’s 64-layer 3D NAND flash. As an external drive that supports the USB 3.2 Gen 2 interface, the G-Drive SSD has rated sequential read and write speeds of 1,050MBps and 1,000MBps respectively. There are faster (around 2,000MBps) drives that rely on USB 3.2 Gen 2x2, including two of the units in our performance comparisons, the SanDisk Extreme Pro Portable SSD V2 and the Seagate FireCuda Gaming SSD. At this time, however, few laptops natively support Gen 2x2, slowing the Extreme Pro and FireCuda to Gen 2 speeds. Besides paying a premium for a Gen 2x2 drive, you'd likely have to replace your current system to reap its speed benefits.
Up to 7.68TB 1 of Enterprise-class SSD storage with a one drive write per day (DW/D) endurance rating 3 give you long-term sustained performance and enhanced reliability for all your demanding workloads. The included cable is only 20cm long and made explicitly for Thunderbolt 3.0 and its repurposed USB-C interface. It would be great if G-Technology decided to produce a mini version of this drive (or even simply shrink the current device for a new 2018 offering), and also introduced a 2TB version to compete with Samsung. Making it waterproof would be the icing on the cake but that’s unlikely to happen, mainly because that would put it in direct competition with SanDisk products, another sub-brand of Western Digital. We’ve seen numerous ways to avoid this issue, some sold by Western Digital, the owners of the SanDisk brand, so why they didn’t use them here is a mystery.Using the AJA Video Systems test, and a single 64GB file, the test started well enough with a write performance of greater than 2,000MB/s until it wrote around 34GB.
The Sandisk Professional G-Drive is not your bog standard external drive. Not only is it rugged, it also comes with a five-year warranty but fails to match Seagate’s Rescue Data Recovery Service which is now bundled for free, with quite a few mainstream external SSD (like the recently reviewed Seagate OneTouch 1TB external SSD ). The drive comes with a pair of 2-foot-long connection cables, one USB-C to USB-C, the other USB-C to USB-A. Pry open this drive and you will find a Western Digital WD40EMRX-82UZ0N0, otherwise known as the WD Red. This is a 4TB hard disk drive spinning at 5400RPM with 64MB cache – a storage device that has been fine-tuned to deliver cooler temperatures in use and targets NAS users. You do get a five year warranty with it but you will have to send the defective drive to Sandisk at your own expense. It is worth noting that if you use a data recovery service, you will not void an otherwise valid limited warranty as long as you get a written verification from the service provider. The competition
Given that the drive is HFS+ formatted out of the box, you will have to reformat the G-Drive to use it with Windows 10, which implies a detour via Computer Management to launch Disk Management and create the partition. Once that was done, we managed to reach a real life performance (moving a single 10GB file using Windows Explorer) of just under 400MBps while various benchmarks (AJA, CDM, ATTO and AS SSD) show that the write speeds ranged between 947 and 1041MBps while the read speeds reached up to 1064. Not bad at all. On Crystal DiskMark, the SanDisk Professional G-Drive SSD came within striking distance of its rating, delivering 958MBps read and 961MBps write. Only two of our Gen 2 comparison drives exceeded their rated speeds—the SanDisk Extreme Portable SSD V2, with 1,072MBps read and 1,044MBps write, and the WD My Passport SSD, which managed a read speed of 1,066MBps. (We tested its write speed at 954MBps.) The G-Drive external HDD shows that spinning hard drives still have their place in an increasingly SSD-centric marketplace. This product hits a good balance between being relatively affordable and suitably capacious. There is a good selection of Thunderbolt-exclusive drives around that can deliver better than USB 3.2 levels of performance, so how does the PRO compare?
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