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 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. G-Drive Pro has a solid, anodized aluminum enclosure. Not only does it look good but it offers robust protection for the Enterprise Class Drive inside. The included cable is only 20cm long and made explicitly for Thunderbolt 3.0 and its repurposed USB-C interface. The SanDisk Professional G-Drive Pro is a sleek and stylish desktop Hard Drive equipped with the latest Thunderbolt 3 and USB-C interfaces. The G-Drive SSD comes with none of these, regrettably. We can only conclude that those who designed the G-Drive SSD assumed that it would be mostly Apple macOS users purchasing this drive, and they have Time Machine and don’t need any other tools.

In short, the new G-DRIVE Desktop Drive is cheaper than it once was, but it’s still markedly overpriced for what it offers. 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. When we return to conventional spinning disks, the difference between the performance of these are capable, and NAND flash is enormous.

Given the IP67 rating, it should handle the odd splash of water, being dumped in the dust and, with 2000lb of crush resistance, accidentally driven over by a family car. And for those wondering if this high pricing is Brexit related, it isn’t. The prices for this range in France are equally inflated, being €163.99,€264.99, €410.99 and €769.99.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. SanDisk delivers the drive pre-formatted with APFS for the Apple macOS, something that will cause some confusion with Windows owners who aren’t familiar with how to reformat drives. 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. The less optimistic AJA System test presented 881MB/s reads and 871MB/s writes using a 16GB test file. SanDisk’s chosen connection technology is USB-C, and a 1m long cable rated for 20Mbit transfers is included in the box with the drive and PSU.

With a premium, anodized aluminum enclosure, the G-DRIVE pairs beautifully with your high-end computer and gives you durable strength you can feel. In the promotional material, it is noted that the USB interface on this drive is a 10Gbps Gen 2 variety, an improvement over the previous 5Gbps Gen 1 interface on the old design. The available capacities are 500GB, 1TB and 2TB, and all these are roughly the same size and weight irrespective of capacity.

A premium product that combines top-of-the-range durability with high speed transfers

For your demanding workloads and high-value content, you can rely on the power and enhanced reliability of the 7200RPM Ultrastar enterprise-class hard drive inside. As good as this sounds, the fastest drive in this range, the 22TB, has a maximum speed of 280MB/s, which doesn’t come close to exceeding the bandwidth of a Gen 1 interface. Making the Gen 2 interface a largely irrelevant change.