Why they didn’t use exFAT and a utility that runs on both platforms to reformat the drive for both groups is a mystery. Because that’s normally what Western Digital does, the overarching business that owns the SanDisk brand.

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 sizes of portable hard drives are, quite understandable, limited by the 2.5in spinning disk situated within them – with manufacturers able to shrink SSDs beyond these confines. Nevertheless, the LaCie Mobile Drive is among the smallest and best-looking hard drives out there, with the 2TB version offering dimensions of 14 x 85 x 118mm. 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. 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.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. Currently, the largest capacity conventional hard drives Western Digital make is 22TB. But we’re confident that when they make larger ones, they’ll probably extend this series to accommodate those increased capacities. There is a good selection of Thunderbolt-exclusive drives around that can deliver better than USB 3.2 levels of performance, so how does the PRO compare? 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. The milled aluminum and rubberized coating provide a sturdy home for the NAND module mounted inside the SanDisk Professional G-DRIVE SSD.

The two big selling points here are the quality of construction and the dramatic amount of capacity potentially on offer. The less optimistic AJA System test presented 881MB/s reads and 871MB/s writes using a 16GB test file.

Ample desktop storage for accessible backups

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.

The Sandisk Professional G-Drive is not your bog standard external drive. Not only is it rugged, it also comes with a five-year warranty but fails to match Seagate’s Rescue Data Recovery Service which is now bundled for free, with quite a few mainstream external SSD (like the recently reviewed Seagate OneTouch 1TB external SSD ). 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. 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 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.

A high-quality external SSD

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. 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. 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.