SanDisk Extreme Portable SSD 1TB up to 550MB/s read Solid State Drive

Product Information

When used with a USB Type-C cable, the SanDisk Extreme rises above the competition with some stellar numbers. The design and form factor are spot on and while we have one reservation regarding the bundled cable, you can’t go wrong at this price. A footnote about the branding. G-Tech (from which G-Drive is derived) started life as part of HGST, which was acquired by Western Digital. G-Tech survived as a rival to Seagate’s LaCie, supplying rugged, external, reliable storage devices and accessories to outdoor enthusiasts, prosumers and professionals. With the recent launch of Sandisk Professional, it is likely that G-Tech and G-Drive will be sunsetted in the near future. Overall though, if you discard the far cheaper alternatives from lesser known vendors, there’s little incentive for Sandisk to drop the price of the G-Drive further. That is particularly true given the presence of the speedier and far more expensive G-Drive Pro SSD which carries a 50% premium and a near-200% improvement in speed thanks to its Thunderbolt 3 interface. LaCie, Seagate, Glyph, WD, Lexar and G-Technology also have similar rugged and high capacity external SSDs, but none of them have a unique selling point that would make them stand out against the T5, the SE730H or the SanDisk. We devote hundreds of hours of rigorous testing to help make sure your drive is worthy of your best work — and so you know your precious files are in good hands.

We run two sets of tests when we’re looking at external hard drives for the Xbox Series S and Series X. First, we connect them to a PC and run the CrystalDiskMark benchmark to test their raw sequential and random read/write speeds. Sequential speeds are an indication of how fast the drive can read or write large quantities of data in one sustained burst, which makes a big difference when you’re first running a game, loading a saved game, streaming in all the models and textures in a level, or transferring a game from one drive to another. Random read/write speeds cover smaller data transfers, and make an impact when you’re running a game directly from the hard drive.

The best external drives for Xbox Series X and Xbox Series S

From SanDisk, the brand professional photographers worldwide trust to handle their best shots and footage. Newer and faster versions of both USB and Thunderbolt have been rolling out in some external drives over the last couple of years. They offer twice the potential bandwidth of previous implementations. You'll need ports to match them on your computer to get the most speed out of these drives, but depending on the drive, the real-world speed ramifications may not be as big a deal as they might sound. It has a USB-C connection concealed beneath a chunky rubber flap and plug, with a Type-A adaptor provided. Don’t expect much in the way of extreme speed – it’s rated at a max 140MB/sec, and we tested it at 119MB/sec read and 141MB/sec write – but this is more of a tank than a Ferrari. Most of us don’t need to splash out on a drive that offers this level of protection, but if you want to store big image and video files and want a drive that’s built to withstand most disasters, then the Armor ATD won’t let you down. Get extra peace of mind with a 5-year limited warranty 3 and a durable silicon shell that offers a premium feel and added protection to the drive’s exterior. What's the best way to be sure your external drive won't suffer an early demise due to rough handling? Keep it in a climate-controlled room, wrapped in bubble wrap, resting on a feather pillow, and plugged safely into a stationary desktop PC.

For all their uses, USB ports like to mess with us from time to time, so it helps to troubleshoot the port. Admin said:Here are the best external hard drives and SSDs for the money. These drives offer the best balance of performance, features and price. A full install of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II with the Warzone 2.0 Battle Royale mode will take well over 100GB on the internal SSD. Ditto for Forza Horizon 5. Go for this year’s big exclusive, Starfield, and you’re looking at around 125GB. Sign up to Xbox Games Pass and make use of its extensive library, and you could see your available storage space reduced to zero before you know it. Neither the name of the University of California, Berkeley nor the names of its contributors may be used to endorse or promote products derived from this software without specific prior written permission. Most such multi-bay devices are sold without the actual hard drives included, so you can install any drive you want (usually, 3.5-inch drives, but some support laptop-style 2.5-inchers). Their total storage capacities are limited only by their number of available bays and the capacities of the drives you put in them. The storage industry refers to these (as well as smaller-capacity externals as a whole) as DAS—for "direct attached storage"—to distinguish them from NAS, or network attached storage, many of which are also multi-bay devices that can take two or more drives that you supply. (See our separate roundup of the best NAS drives.)But with square corners and an antiquated, two-tone design, the drive isn’t a looker. And it finished near the bottom of all of our performance tests. A drive letter conflict is a common problem with removable devices, and you can fix this issue with these steps:

Still, while external SSDs are cheaper than they were a few years ago (see the best we've tested at the preceding link), they're far from a complete replacement for spinning drives. Larger external drives designed to stay on your desk or in a server closet still almost exclusively use spinning-drive mechanisms, taking advantage of platter drives' much higher capacities and much lower prices compared with SSDs. The Extreme Portable SSD comes pre-formatted as an exFAT device which means that it can work on Windows and Mac out of the box. Reformattingit to NTFS will limit compatibility to Windows but will enable TRIM which will improve the longevity of the drive. The LaCie 2big RAID array promises the reliability and delivers the performance benefit you'd expect from 7,200rpm platters, magnified by the default RAID 0 setting, while the optional RAID 1 setting is available if you want data redundancy. (A JBOD mode is also available if you don't want to use RAID.) Who It's For CrystalDiskMark 7.0.0 (8GB workloads, single-thread sequential read and write, queue depths of 1 and 8)

Whether you’re running out of storage space or in need of a fast backup, these speedy HDDs and SSDs will give you what you need

A collection of spinning drives configured with a RAID level designed for faster data access can approximate the speeds of a basic SSD, while you should consider a drive with support for RAID levels 1, 5, or 10 if you're storing really important data that you can't afford to lose. Hit the link above for an explanation of the traits and strengths of each RAID level. Some require you to sacrifice raw capacity for data redundancy, so you'll want to pay attention to the nuances of each level.

Once connected, you may need to enable the drive in Windows using the Disk Management tool, as detailed in Step 3 above.Warning: Using this process will erase everything on the drive. If you have any data that you want to keep, make sure to connect it to a supported device, extract the data, and only then continue with the steps below.