With a premium, anodized aluminum enclosure, the G-DRIVE pairs beautifully with your high-end computer and gives you durable strength you can feel.

For our own folder transfer test, we use a MacBook Pro laptop. This drag-and-drop test consists of copying a standard 1.2GB folder from the Mac to the test drive, with a stopwatch showing how long it took to finish the job. For those purchasing the G-DRIVE SSD for their Apple Mac, all they need to do is connect it to a recent Apple Mac computer, as the drive is pre-formatted with APFS.G-Drive Pro has a solid, anodized aluminum enclosure. Not only does it look good but it offers robust protection for the Enterprise Class Drive inside. Support for up to 45 watts of USB Power Delivery through the USB-C port allows you to charge your compatible MacBook or MacBook Pro without having to take a separate charger out of your bag. We’re looking for 2TB superfast, extremely rugged, IP67+ rated external solid state drives. That disqualifies the likes of the popular Samsung T7 Touch which is not waterproof.

In short, the new G-DRIVE Desktop Drive is cheaper than it once was, but it’s still markedly overpriced for what it offers. As a result, Microsoft Windows users will discover that the drive doesn’t appear if they connect it, even if they have Thunderbolt ports. Where this drive is better than the more expensive PRO-G40 is that it at least comes with both the USB cables most customers will need, and they are also a decent length. Included in the box are two 50cm cables, one each for USB-C and USB-A connections, allowing it to be connected to most computers that support USB. External storage is currently going through a transition away from conventional magnetic storage devices to solid state, specifically NAND-based SSDs.And, worryingly, where SanDisk previously provided both USB-A and USB-C cables, the new design comes exclusively with a single USB-C cable. That’s a cost reduction from the previous G-DRIVE Desktop design and dramatically cheaper than the PRO model that uses a Thunderbolt connection. Given the premium price of this drive, it was disappointing to see that Western Digital provides no software with this unit at all, assuming the customer has that already. Since NAND makers moved away from using DRAM to cache to make cheaper SLC technology solutions, this isn’t an issue unique to this drive, but it is something you need to be aware of. In the promotional material, it is noted that the USB interface on this drive is a 10Gbps Gen 2 variety, an improvement over the previous 5Gbps Gen 1 interface on the old design.

As good as this sounds, the fastest drive in this range, the 22TB, has a maximum speed of 280MB/s, which doesn’t come close to exceeding the bandwidth of a Gen 1 interface. Making the Gen 2 interface a largely irrelevant change. However, the problem with quoting those numbers is that the PRO will only sustain those, or specifically the write performance over a short sprint. 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.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 ). We know that this drive has an SLC cache of 14GB, and so we assume that system caching represented the other 20GB until the PRO ran out of writing steam. The port type is critical because USB 3.2 Gen 1 only offers 5Gbit/s of bandwidth, which equates to roughly 500MB/s, or the same speed as SATA SSDs can achieve. For all your demanding workloads and mission-critical content, you can rely on the power and enhanced reliability of the 7200RPM Ultrastar ® enterprise-class hard drives inside. SanDisk’s chosen connection technology is USB-C, and a 1m long cable rated for 20Mbit transfers is included in the box with the drive and PSU.