Solid state drives don’t utilize moving parts, so the G-DRIVE Mobile SSD is able to endure accidental bumps or drops to help protect against data loss and system failures.

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.Perhaps that would have required some software for both platforms on a dual access partition, and SanDisk has made no attempt at any software for this drive at all.

The interface on the PRO-G40 is more sophisticated, as it can handle Thunderbolt and USB, not just Thunderbolt. And the PRO-G40 has the same 2TB maximum capacity and much greater crush resistance, offers waterproofing and is smaller. 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. Dual 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. 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.

Testing the G-Drive SSD: A Folder-Transfer Fiend

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. We know that this drive has an SLC cache of 14GB, and so we assume that system caching represented the other 20GB until the PRO ran out of writing steam.

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. 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. The G-Drive SSD is available in capacities up to 2TB, providing small and mighty storage to edit and save your 4K footage, RAW photos, and media libraries wherever you are. 5-Year Limited Warranty Offering an industry-leading 5-year limited warranty, the G-DRIVE SSD is ready to provide high-performance storage for years to come.

A Compact, Elegant Portable Drive

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. 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.