SanDisk Professional G-DRIVE 4TB Enterprise-Class Desktop Hard Drive, up to 250MB/s USB-C (5Gbps), USB 3.2 Gen 1

Product Information

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

Making it somewhat water/dust resistant and hardware encryption doesn’t justify more than doubling the cost, unfortunately. 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. As a result, Microsoft Windows users will discover that the drive doesn’t appear if they connect it, even if they have Thunderbolt ports.We know this because the performance here is at least twice that of a SATA SSD, at around 1,000MB/s. With dual Thunderbolt 3 ports, you can conveniently daisy-chaining for up to 5 additional devices, keeping you connected to multiple drives, 4K displays, and more, through a single connection to your computer. The new design has more plastic and less metal, but this hardware is still substantially a heatsink, and our review model weighed 1323g with the 12TB drive inside.

Apple users can use Time Machine, and Windows users can use whatever sync tools they have to hand, if any. 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. 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. Therefore, for those with USB 3.0 (USB 3.2 Gen 1) ports, there is little point in purchasing this drive over cheaper options because you will never see its actual performance. The less optimistic AJA System test presented 881MB/s reads and 871MB/s writes using a 16GB test file.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. 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.

That they don’t include a USB-A to USB-C cable is a disappointment at this price, although most customers will probably have this item if they need it.

Thank you!

Why they didn’t use exFAT and a utility that runs on both platforms to reformat the drive for both groups is a mystery. Because that’s normally what Western Digital does, the overarching business that owns the SanDisk brand. 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.) Turn off or choose between three modes of brightness (off, default, and bright) to easily adjust the LED lights.