SanDisk Professional 2TB G-DRIVE SSD, Ultra-Rugged, Shock, Dust and Water proof, Portable External NVMe SSD, Up to 1050MB/s, USB-C (10Gbps), USB 3.2 Gen 2, Thunderbolt 3

Product Information

USB-C port with a SuperSpeed USB 10Gbps (USB 3.2 Gen 2) interface keeps this SSD ready for laptops and desktops, both old and new. The G-Technology G-Drive 4TB is still very much competitive with rivals launched in 2017. Final verdict

Pry open this drive and you will find a Western Digital WD40EMRX-82UZ0N0, otherwise known as the WD Red. This is a 4TB hard disk drive spinning at 5400RPM with 64MB cache – a storage device that has been fine-tuned to deliver cooler temperatures in use and targets NAS users. Solid state drives don’t utilize moving parts, so the G-DRIVE SSD is able to endure accidental bumps or drops to help protect against data loss and system failures. 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.

Solid, rugged, fast, and justifiably expensive

Being able to read or write at these high levels is helpful for those that need to get on a plane or train or have other time pressures on them. Not surprisingly, the drive comes with a three-year limited warranty, plus a pair of USB Type-C cables and extra plugs for mainland Europe territories. But possibly the biggest issue with this design is the maximum capacity of 2TB, an amount that might have seemed huge a few short years ago but looks underwhelming now. The features of the SanDisk Professional G-Drive PRO will be familiar to those that have experienced any of the SanDisk Professional SSD products recently. The drive uses 3D NAND which delivers lower power consumption and cheaper prices. It was detected as a SanDisk X600, an M.2 SATA model that features WD’s 64-layer 3D NAND flash.

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.

Offering an industry-leading 5-year limited warranty, the G-Drive SSD is ready to provide high-performance storage for years to come. 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. The G-Drive mobile SSD has a USB 3.1 Gen 2 port which in theory can transfer data at up to 10Gbps, twice what traditional USB 3.0 can achieve. However, we paired it with one of the latter and couldn’t achieve the maximum rated transfer speeds of up to 560MBps. 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. 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.