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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. In short, it is on par with the excellent PRO-G40, delivering blistering 2750MB/s reads and 2500MB/s writes using CrystalDiskMark 8.0.4. as a simple benchmark test. 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.) 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. Although it was launched more than a year ago, the G-Drive is still very much competitive with rivals launched in 2017. It is fast, reasonably well built, compatible with Apple products and has a faster implementation of USB Type-C.
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. It has been fine-tuned to deliver cooler temperatures in use and targets NAS users. Usage and performanceDual Thunderbolt 3 ports allow you to daisy chain up to five additional devices through a single connection to your computer, so you can stay connected to multiple drives, 4K displays and more. 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. SanDisk, a brand that sits alongside G-Drive in the Western Digital Corporation portfolio, sells the Extreme portable external SSD. It is fully rugged and retails for less than the G-Drive. While it has a shorter warranty, similar to the T5, it’s slightly smaller than the G-Drive mobile SSD.
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.
Wielding WD’s Blue SN550E and a crush-proof enclosure, the SanDisk Professional G-Drive SSD is a responsive, rugged and secure portable SSD.
A protective aluminum core helps prevent overheating and maintains high performance, while a custom enclosure insulates the drive when in use. Our tests, carried out with CrystalDiskMark, Atto and AS SSD, yielded similar results with read and write speeds between 430MBps and 441MBps, roughly what you’d expect from a USB 3.0 port. A 10GB file was transferred in 73.8 seconds, which translates into a real-life transfer speed of 136MBps.
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. 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. 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. We recommend going for a 1TB model compared to the smaller capacity – five years is a lifetime in the world of flash memory, and while it is commendable that G-Drive offers such a long warranty, before that period is up, it is likely that professionals – whom the G-Drive mobile SSD targets – will have moved on to faster, more reliable and/or cheaper storage devices. 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.The G-Technology G-Drive 4TB is still very much competitive with rivals launched in 2017. Final verdict 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.
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. Offering an industry-leading 5-year limited warranty, the G-DRIVE SSD is ready to provide high-performance storage for years to come. 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.The included cable is only 20cm long and made explicitly for Thunderbolt 3.0 and its repurposed USB-C interface. 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. 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.
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