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The available capacities are 500GB, 1TB and 2TB, and all these are roughly the same size and weight irrespective of capacity. And while it does both those things admirably, it also makes the unit heavy and unsuitable to put in a laptop bag with a computer. With its external PSU, sharp edges and multiple USB cables, this drive needs its own bag for carrying, and it isn’t that portable.
The G-Drive SSD comes with none of these, regrettably. We can only conclude that those who designed the G-Drive SSD assumed that it would be mostly Apple macOS users purchasing this drive, and they have Time Machine and don’t need any other tools. The new design seems to be transitioning to more plastic and less metal, but there isn’t anything special about this solution unless you need 22TB of extra space sitting on your desk alongside your workday computer. It has been fine-tuned to deliver cooler temperatures in use and targets NAS users. Usage and performance And, worryingly, where SanDisk previously provided both USB-A and USB-C cables, the new design comes exclusively with a single USB-C cable.
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. The cable is too short for use with a desktop system but fine for a laptop, assuming that it has Thunderbolt ports and not USB-C. The potential confusion that could easily arise when the drive and its cable plug easily into a computer, phone or tablet with USB-C but then fails to work. 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 The less optimistic AJA System test presented 881MB/s reads and 871MB/s writes using a 16GB test file. 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.
Once the write cache became saturated, the performance declined significantly to an average of 921MB/s when it hit the end of the 64GB file. Currently, there are five capacity options for the new G-DRIVE Desktop Drive that include 4TB, 6TB, 12TB, 18TB and 22 TB drives. The milled aluminum and rubberized coating provide a sturdy home for the NAND module mounted inside the SanDisk Professional G-DRIVE SSD. When connected to a PC using USB 3.2 Gen 2 ports, our speeds topped out at around 1,050MB/s reads with 1,000 MB/s writes on CrystalDiskMark 8.0.4, irrespective of USB-A or USB-C.But the same as that counterpart, SanDisk doesn’t provide a pouch or case to carry the drive and its cables, a niche that some third party will undoubtedly fill. That’s a cost reduction from the previous G-DRIVE Desktop design and dramatically cheaper than the PRO model that uses a Thunderbolt connection. As well engineered as the new G-Drive Desktop is, and it is lovely, in a direct comparison with the mostly plastic opposition from Seagate, this product is expensive. However, the problem with quoting those numbers is that the PRO will only sustain those, or specifically the write performance over a short sprint.
Unless you find an exceptional deal from a retailer wishing to flush these out of the channel, we’d recommend an alternative design, possibly from SanDisk. For all your demanding workloads and mission-critical content, you can rely on the power and enhanced reliability of the Ultrastar™ enterprise-class 7200RPM hard drive inside. The SSD controller and the NAND Flash memory used are unknown; however, we’d assume that it shares some DNA with the SN530, Western Digital’s entry level NVMe platform. While it will work with USB 2.0 and USB 3.0 (aka USB 3.1), to get the best transfer speeds from it requires a port with USB 3.2 Gen 2 10Gbit/s. These are that the drive comes pre-formatted for Apple Mac, and not Windows PC, because for whatever reason, SanDisk assumes Windows users understand partitioning and reformatting drives, where it is beyond Apple customers.As it comes pre-formatted for Apple APFS, Windows PC owners will need to understand how to use the Management Console and volume management to reformat the drive to a file system that Windows will understand. With dual Thunderbolt™ 3 ports, you can conveniently daisy-chain for up to 5 additional devices, keeping you connected to multiple drives, 4K displays, and more, through a single connection to your computer. 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. Overall, this is a very nicely engineered and constructed external drive that looks able to cope with abuse that might be expected to kill those external SSDs that are made mostly of plastic.
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