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At a glance
Expert evaluation
advantages
- Fastest USB drive to date with 10 Gbit / s
- Degree of protection IP67 against dust and water
- Stylish
- Same or cheaper than the competition
Our verdict
There is no faster or more robust small 10 Gbps SSD on the market. It’s also relatively cheap.
Price upon review
$ 150 (512 GB); $ 250 (1TB); $ 360 (2TB)
Best prices today
Not available
The fast and light G-Drive SSD is as attractive and fast as its branding is obscure. It can be purchased from the WD (Western Digital) store under the SanDisk Professional brand and is part of the G-Drive line. Some may recall that G-Drive was a boutique Mac storage provider a while back. WD bought G-Drive and SanDisk, which develops almost all of the parent company’s solid-state technology. Hence, it is the SandDisk Professional G-Drive SSD from WD.
Who cares you say Just fill in. The ride is excellent so let’s move on.
Design and prices
The G-Drive SSD is a USB 3.2 Gen 2 (10 Gbps), Type-C solid-state drive that comes in 500GB, 1TB, and 2TB variants for $ 150, $ 250 ($ 230 on sale) and $ 360. That’s actually a bit less than competing drives from Seagate and LaCie. The drive measures approximately 3.75 inches long, 2 inches long, and is a little over half an inch thick.
The drive is predominantly dark gray with the top and bottom slotted to allow heat to dissipate from the internal metal structure. A silver end cap on the business end houses the single Type-C USB port, and on the other end of the drive is a small LED activity indicator with a slot.
WD didn’t comment on the SSD inside, but it’s likely one of the company’s lower NVMe models, as evidenced by the transfer rate of around 1 GBps (SATA would be 550 MBps). Nothing faster is required when USB is already limiting performance.
The drive is preformatted to HFS +, but you can reformat it to exFAT if you want to share data with Windows machines, or NTFS if you only write from Windows PCs. Sandisk includes both Type C to Type C and Type C to Type A USB cables.
WD did not provide a TBW rating. However, the drive comes with a five year warranty, which is a nice change from the more common three years.
power
We didn’t get very good USB performance out of our new 24-inch iMac, so take the Disk Speed ​​Test results (immediately below) for what you might see on Apple Silicon, but not the true potential of the Drive. We tested the drive on PCWorld’s testbed to get a clearer picture of it. Overall, the drive was by far the fastest 10Gbps USB we tested, as you’ll see below.
The CrystalDiskMark 6 tests run on the test stand of sister publication PCWorld are more similar to those you see on an Intel Mac or PC. They also meet WD’s standards and are faster than the competition. In fact, they’re the fastest we’ve seen on a 10 Gbps USB SSD.
The G-Drive SSD clearly outperformed the competition in our 48 GB real world transfer tests, and by a fairly large margin. That was an unexpected but pleasant surprise. Note that a drive is the fastest external USB stick we’ve seen from SanDisk yet Extremely portable professional.
The G-Drive SSD also quickly wrote our single 450GB file to its cells. It easily outperformed the Extreme Portable Pro and the recently tested LaCie Portable SSD, but has been equated by the Seagate FireCuda gaming SSD. The pace was also very steady, not slowing down a single time during the entire 450GB writing.
Bottom line
The SanDisk Professional G-Drive SSD is currently the cream of the crop among portable 10 Gbit / s USB crops. It’s a bit bigger than some and maybe not as sexy as others, but it’s the fastest, cheapest from a branded supplier and one of the few to have an IP67 rating. Nice.
Jon is a Juilliard-trained musician, former x86 / 6800 programmer, and longtime computer enthusiast (late 1970’s) who lives on San Francisco Bay. [email protected]
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