SanDisk Professional G-Drive SSD

Western Digital's new SanDisk Professional line, of which the SanDisk Professional G-Drive SSD ($149.99 for 500GB; $359.99 for 2TB as tested) is one of the first products, is touted as offering premium storage solutions for content creators and professionals. The G-Drive SSD fits that bill. It costs a little more than similar external solid-state drives but it has a compact, attractive design, plus solid speed and capacity. And it's crushproof, drop-proof, and impervious to sand, dust, and water (except for long and deep immersion). Geared to Mac users, it's preformatted in HFS+, requiring a reformat before use with Windows' NTFS or exFAT. The G-Drive SSD earns an Editors' Choice award for Mac users seeking a rugged, rapid external solid-state drive.

This Portable SSD Plays (and Works) Best With Macs

The G-Drive SSD is an upgrade to the G-Technology G-Drive Mobile SSD, and is nearly twice as fast as that model (which has a rated speed of 560MBps), along with boasting a higher crush-proof rating and 256-bit AES hardware-based encryption. Like its predecessor, the SanDisk Professional G-Drive SSD is one of the more rugged drives on the market. It shares its Mac-friendly HFS+ file format with the G-Technology drive and the new SanDisk Professional G-Drive ArmorATD, which is a platter-based model.

HFS+ is one of two formats (the other is APFS) compatible with the Time Machine backup system in macOS. Windows, on the other hand, can't even read HFS+. If you need to use the G-Drive SSD with both Macs and Windows PCs, you'll want to reformat it to exFAT. This can be done through a Mac's Disk Utility, where HFS+ is called Mac OS Extended (Journaled).

If you only have a Windows machine and need to convert the file format to NTFS, you can do so with Windows' Disk Management utility by carefully deleting the HFS+ partition and reformatting the drive as NTFS, wiping the drive clean. Utilities such as Paragon NTFS-HFS Converter offer simple, painless, and straightforward ways to convert drives from HFS+ to NTFS and back.

Before you try to change the G-Drive SSD's file format, it's a good idea to back up any of your data on it. (The Paragon utility even prompts you to back it up.) SanDisk includes both Mac and Windows versions of its SanDisk Security, which supports AES-256 hardware encryption and lets you set a password to protect the data on your drive. You should save copies of both versions of the utility before reformatting the drive.

A Compact, Elegant Portable Drive

Black with silver trim and measuring 0.6 by 2 by 3.7 inches (HWD), the G-Drive SSD is compact and handsome. On the top and bottom are grille-like slits that let heat dissipate from the drive's aluminum core. At one end is a small status light that blinks purplish white while a transfer is in progress. At the other end is a USB-C connector for the included cables.

The drive comes with a pair of 2-foot-long connection cables, one USB-C to USB-C, the other USB-C to USB-A.

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.

Built to Take a Tumble

The sturdy G-Drive SSD is certified crushproof up to a pressure of 2,000 pounds and can survive a drop of up to 9.7 feet. Its Ingress Protection rating of IP67 tells us it's been certified both dustproof and waterproof, the latter to a depth of three feet for up to 30 minutes. Only a few drives that we have reviewed—among them the solid-state ADATA SE800 and platter-based ADATA HD830 External Hard Drive—have a higher IP68 rating, as they are even more water-tight.

I've cited list prices above for the versions of the G-Drive SSD, but based on current (Amazon) retail pricing, the G-Drive SSD will set you back 19 cents per gigabyte for the 1TB model and 15 cents a gig for 2TB, which is a little on the pricey side compared with other recent Gen 2 drives. The 2020 upgrade to the WD My Passport SSD sells for 15 and 14 cents per gigabyte in 1TB and 2TB capacities respectively. The SanDisk Extreme Portable SSD V2 costs 14 cents per gig in both its 1TB and 2TB forms. The ADATA SE800, which as mentioned is even more ruggedized than the G-Drive SSD, sells for 13 cents per gigabyte for 1TB (its highest capacity).

SanDisk backs the G-Drive SSD with a five-year warranty, which is a plus—many external drives are covered for only three years.

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

We subjected the G-Drive SSD to our usual suite of external solid-state drive benchmarks, comprising Crystal DiskMark 6.0, PCMark 10 Storage, BlackMagic's Disk Speed Test, and our own folder transfer test. The first two are run on a PC with the drive formatted in NTFS, and the latter two on a 2016 MacBook Pro using exFAT. Crystal DiskMark's sequential speed tests provide a traditional measure of drive throughput, simulating best-case, straight-line transfers of large files. The PCMark 10 Storage test measures an SSD's readiness for a wide variety of everyday tasks. (See more about how we test SSDs.)

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.)

The PCMark 10 Storage benchmark generates a proprietary score based on a mix of simulated workloads, including a Windows Defender scan, video editing tasks, and application launches. It gives an assessment of overall performance for everyday tasks. The G-Drive SSD turned in a score of 1,558, which is about average among our comparison drives.

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.

The G-Drive SSD claimed bragging rights by clearing the 1-second mark, the quickest score in this group, while half of the comparison drives took 2 seconds and the others between 3 and 6 seconds. (In fact, the only other external drive we've tried that has managed a 1-second folder transfer is the zippy yet hyper-expensive, Mac-centric Samsung Portable SSD X5, which pulled it off in 2018.) While you shouldn't read too much into this in terms of real-world, routine file handling, suffice it to say that the G-Drive SSD is an ace at copying folders.

Last up: the Mac-only BlackMagic testing utility. It was designed to help videographers gauge how a drive will perform when working with large video files. The G-Drive SSD posted BlackMagic scores of 923MBps read and 900MBps write, in the middle of our Gen 2 pack. BlackMagic scores tend to be a little lower than equivalent Crystal DiskMark scores, and that was true with the SanDisk as well as most of the drives that we compared it with.

A Rugged Drive for Mac Content Creators

The SanDisk Professional line gets off to a strong start with the G-Drive SSD, a compact, lightweight, and attractive external drive that's quicker and more rugged than its G-Technology predecessor. Its speed is comparable to other USB 3.2 Gen 2 SSDs.

It's best for Mac users due to its HFS+ formatting, but it can be reformatted for dual macOS and Windows use or even as a Windows-only drive if need be. It's also a bit more expensive than our favorite Gen 2 external drives, but the price difference is modest at its highest (2TB) capacity. If you're looking for rough-and-ready service from a fast drive that also complements the latest Macs or sleek black or silver Windows ultraportables, this Editors' Choice award winner will please.