Included in the box are two 50cm cables, one each for USB-C and USB-A connections, allowing it to be connected to most computers that support USB. As a USB drive, these numbers are solid and equivalent to those that we’ve seen from the Crucial X8 and its like. There are faster USB drives that use the USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 standard, such as the PNY EliteX-PRO and Kingston XS2000. For those curious, Thunderbolt-connected SSDs can be three times these speeds, something to consider for those that have that port and can afford those drives.

But before you plan to secure 22TB of data to one of these, it is worth considering that as this isn’t an SSD, it might easily take more than a whole day to move that much information to or from the drive.

The G-Drive PRO has dual Thunderbolt 3 ports allowing you to daisy-chaining up to another 5 thunderbolt devices, keeping you connected to multiple drives, 4K displays, and more, through a single connection to your computer. The available capacities are 500GB, 1TB and 2TB, and all these are roughly the same size and weight irrespective of capacity. Having it made from metal might have made more sense if the enclosure was designed to be reused, but the maker doesn’t encourage that, confusingly.

With a premium, anodized aluminum enclosure, the G-DRIVE pairs beautifully with your high-end computer and gives you durable strength you can feel. When put side by side in this way, the SanDisk Professional G-Drive PRO SSD is eclipsed by the PRO-G40, which matches the PRO on speed and is superior in almost every other respect. However, the problem with quoting those numbers is that the PRO will only sustain those, or specifically the write performance over a short sprint. With the solid and stylish all-aluminum enclosure, G-DRIVE PRO not only performs at high levels, it looks good doing it too.

For all your demanding workloads and mission-critical content, you can rely on the power and enhanced reliability of the 7200RPM Ultrastar ® enterprise-class hard drives inside. As a result, Microsoft Windows users will discover that the drive doesn’t appear if they connect it, even if they have Thunderbolt ports. When we return to conventional spinning disks, the difference between the performance of these are capable, and NAND flash is enormous. For those that own an Apple Mac, just connect the drive and then use it to manually copy files or configure it for Time Machine use. 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.

For all your demanding workloads and mission-critical content, you can rely on the power and enhanced reliability of the Ultrastar™ enterprise-class 7200RPM hard drive inside. External storage is currently going through a transition away from conventional magnetic storage devices to solid state, specifically NAND-based SSDs. And, competing against its own products, Western Digital makes the excellent My Book Duo, where the 16TB drive (2 x 8TB) is a little more than the 18TB G-DRIVE Desktop Drive but offers a resilient mirroring option and allows the users to change the drives. With no resilience against drive failure in this design, what you’re gambling on is the quality of the mechanism and data recovery if you pay the extra Western Digital wants each year for that potential safety net. We’re not at the point where SSD storage compares to this solution in terms of cost per GB and sizes available, but eventually, it will happen.

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.

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. 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.) With a premium, anodized aluminum enclosure, the G-DRIVE™ PRO pairs beautifully with your high-end computer and gives you durable strength you can feel. And, worryingly, where SanDisk previously provided both USB-A and USB-C cables, the new design comes exclusively with a single USB-C cable. A reasonable assumption to make about these is that they connect the drive to the enclosure and that removing them might facilitate access inside the case.Therefore, when we tested a 12TB edition of the G-DRIVE Desktop Drive, we were forced to reformat it on our test PC before it would appear as a drive in the file system. 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. In short, it is on par with the excellent PRO-G40, delivering blistering 2750MB/s reads and 2500MB/s writes using CrystalDiskMark 8.0.4. as a simple benchmark test.