Joined in 2023 
82 
63 About this deal
What you get with this drive is a short 20 cm cable that works for both Thunderbolt and USB 3.2 Gen 2 connection, but no means to connect the drive to a USB-A, only USB-C ports. But that silicon doesn’t handle USB, so a secondary Asmedia ASM2362 is used for a PCI Express(downstream port) to USB3.1(UFP) bridge.
One area it does shine is that the NVMe inside has the capability for 256-bit AES-XTS hardware encryption, enabling the contents of the drive to be secured effectively.Another issue is that when you look through the NVMe drives from Western Digital manufacturers, the biggest capacity is 4TB, and that’s the largest SSD Mag on offer.
The rear of the SanDisk Pro-Blade Station has three Thunderbolt USB-C ports, one for power and the other two for data. (Image credit: Western Digital Corporation) 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. But the same as that counterpart, SanDisk doesn’t provide a pouch or case to carry the drive and its cables, a niche that some third party will undoubtedly fill. We know this because the performance here is at least twice that of a SATA SSD, at around 1,000MB/s.One curiosity is that the drive can supposedly handle being dropped 3 metres, but in the fine print, that’s onto concrete covered in carpet. The carpet requirement seems to be something of an odd detail, as the world wasn’t fully carpeted when we looked last. Being rugged is good, but the more significant selling point here is the performance of this external drive, which matches some internal SDD storage.
When connected to a PC using USB 3.2 Gen 2 ports, our speeds topped out at around 1,050MB/s reads with 1,000 MB/s writes on CrystalDiskMark 8.0.4, irrespective of USB-A or USB-C. The new design seems to be transitioning to more plastic and less metal, but there isn’t anything special about this solution unless you need 22TB of extra space sitting on your desk alongside your workday computer. On a PC, it should be possible to reformat all four Mags into a single storage volume of up to 16TB, but you couldn’t practically use them away from the Pro=Blade Station, making that largely an academic exercise.
Product Specs
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. We’ve reviewed several external SSDs that support either Thunderbolt or USB 3.2 Gen 2x2, and the increase in bandwidth that these interfaces offer has a dramatic impact on the speeds of reading and writing. 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. All of the SanDisk Professional hardware we’ve seen has been made to a very high specification, and the SanDisk Professional Blade Station is no exception. As well engineered as the new G-Drive Desktop is, and it is lovely, in a direct comparison with the mostly plastic opposition from Seagate, this product is expensive.
Where can you get it?Available direct from Western Digital and from the larger online retailers in most regions. Therefore, for those with USB 3.0 (USB 3.2 Gen 1) ports, there is little point in purchasing this drive over cheaper options because you will never see its actual performance. 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. External storage is currently going through a transition away from conventional magnetic storage devices to solid state, specifically NAND-based SSDs. What Western Digital also usually provides with its My Passport drives are some Windows software utilities that copy user files to the drive or install new firmware releases.Microsoft Windows-using customers will need the technical knowledge and confidence to use the Windows management console to delete the existing partition and create a new NTFS or exFAT volume. For those purchasing the G-DRIVE SSD for their Apple Mac, all they need to do is connect it to a recent Apple Mac computer, as the drive is pre-formatted with APFS.
Great Deal 
New Comment