GEAR MINI TESTS
We put a Joby mini shotgun mic, Samyang follow focus rig, dual-channel wireless audio from DJI and Sandisk external SSD through their paces
WORDS ADAM DUCKWORTH
SANDISK PROFESSIONAL PRO-BLADE TRANSPORT 2TB £357/$280 westerndigital.com
a Sandisk Professional Pro-Blade Transport SSD enclosure costing £69/ $60 – so you are saving a bit of money to go for the combo. The case has a USB-C interface to transfer data at 2000MB/s – not as fast as the desktop dock, but still rapid. The enclosure features a cooling aluminium heat sink to help sustain transfer speeds when moving large volumes of data; we experienced no overheating problems. An increasing number of cameras now write data directly to an external SSD, and this Sandisk version is quick enough to keep up. The Transport dock has no mounting points for a camera rig, so aftermarket accessory producers will need to find a solution. To use it as a conventional external SSD, it plugs into your laptop’s USB-C drive and appears on the desktop as a hard drive. We did our usual real- world test of dragging a 50GB folder of video files onto the drive from a 2017 MacBook Pro laptop, and also with a 2022 Mac Studio. On the laptop, it equalled our fastest ever time: 59 seconds to transfer from computer to SSD. The other way, it took two minutes 27 seconds – average for an SSD. But on the Mac Studio with Thunderbolt 4, it was a staggering 51 seconds and 52 seconds respectively: the fastest result we’ve ever had. As a system, it’s a new idea using compact NVMe SSD drives that are blazing-fast and not too expensive. It could form the heart of a complete SSD-based hard drive workflow that’s scalable as your needs grow.
Last issue, we tested the Sandisk Professional Pro-Dock 4, which acts as a powered hub to connect displays, card readers, A/V devices, Ethernet and more via a single cable to your computer’s Thunderbolt 3 or USB-C port. At its heart are four card reader bays made for Sandisk’s Pro-Readers to slide into. But Sandisk also has a Pro-Blade series, consisting of NVMe SSD drives that slide into a different, £595/$449 Thunderbolt 3 custom desktop dock to give 40Gbps transfer speeds. It’s a shame these Pro-Blade SSDs don’t go into the Pro-Dock 4... But you could plug four 4TB SSDs in the Pro-Blade dock and have a fast 16TB external drive. One where you can swap out different SSDs whenever you need, for a compact storage solution. Sandisk Professional Pro-Blade SSD mags are available separately, priced at £298/$229 for the 2TB size we used. A 1TB version costs a bit less than half of that, and a 4TB version just less than double. All the drives come MacOS ready, but can be reformatted for Windows. These drives can withstand drops up to 3m/9.8ft and have a crush rating of 1814kg/4000lb. The drives can be bought separately, however the one we used came inside
MAC READY The Sandisk Transport is plug-and-go, simple to use on an Apple laptop
SPECIFICATIONS Capacity: 2TB Port: USB-C, 3.2 Gen 2 x2, 20Gbps Maximum read/write speed: 2000MB/s
OS compatibility: MacOS, Windows Pre-format: APFS Dimensions (wxhxd): 130.4x71.5x16mm/ 5.13x2.82x0.63in Weight: 210g/0.46lb
DOCK IT TO ME The
PRO MOVIEMAKER RATING: 8/10 A very fast SSD system Pros: Good build with speedy transfer times Cons: Doesn’t fit into the Pro-Dock 4
drives have an NVMe fitting, so require a dock or case
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PRO MOVIEMAKER
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