GEAR MINI TESTS
SANDISK PROFESSIONAL PRO-G40 2TB £492/$240 westerndigital.com
If you absolutely must own the fastest SSD that Pro Moviemaker has ever tested – this is it. Using our not particularly scientific test of dragging a 50GB folder of video files onto the drive from the computer and timing it, then copying it back to the PC and timing again, we found the Sandisk Professional Pro-G40 2TB was by far the fastest we have ever tested. That was both on our current Mac Studio desktop with Thunderbolt 4 ports and a MacBook Pro with Thunderbolt 3. It took 21 seconds to move the 50GB folder from the drive to the Mac. By comparison, the same test on a Sandisk Extreme Portable 1TB SSD took one minute 11 seconds. That’s significant. To go from the computer to the SSD took one minute 40 seconds on the Extreme and just 51 on the Pro-G40. Up to this point, the fastest we’d seen was the Sandisk Professional Pro-Blade Transport 2TB, which took the Mac Studio with Thunderbolt 4 51 and 52 seconds respectively to transfer data to the SSD and back from it. The Pro-Blade Transport is quite large as it has NVMe SSD drives which
SPECIFICATIONS Capacity: 2TB Port:
USB-C 3.2 Gen 2, Thunderbolt 3 Maximum read/write speed: 3000/2500MB/s Thunderbolt, 1050/1000MB/s USB-C OS compatibility: MacOS, Windows Pre-format: APFS Material: Aluminium Protection: IP68 Dimensions (wxhxd): 111x58x12mm/4.4x2.3x0.5in Weight: 122.3g/0.27lb
MAC-TASTIC Thunderbolt jacks on Apple computers unlock the full speed of the G40 drive
slide into it, and can then be used in the Pro-Blade docking station. If you want something smaller – and even faster – the Sandisk Professional Pro-G40 is it. While we were testing, we had an HDD failure from a different manufacturer’s drive. As it was part of a RAID (redundant array of independent disks), we copied just under 2TB to the Sandisk Professional Pro-G40 2TB to maintain a backup. This took a little over 25 minutes instead of hours. The G40 is also fast enough to act as a scratch disk for any computer that doesn’t run the speediest SSD inside.
You can edit 4K, 8K and even 12K video directly from it, and use it to store your Final Cut Pro or Premiere Pro library. And there are no glitches; it’s just lightning quick. But you do pay for it, as it costs £492 in the UK – though the US street price has just been dropped to $240 from $450. The G-40 has a solid aluminium body and is IP68 rated for water and dust resistance, in addition to withstanding up to 3m/9.8ft drops and 1814kg/4000lb of crushing force. With such a fast drive, heat can be an issue, but the aluminium core helps it dissipate, maintaining read speeds up to 3000MB/s and write speeds up to 2500MB/s via Thunderbolt 3. If you use it on USB-C 3.2 Gen 2 devices, you still get up to 1050MB/s read and 1000MB/s write speeds. The drive comes pre-formatted APFS for macOS 10.13 or later systems and is plug-and-play ready. It can be reformatted for Windows 10 or later. The real beauty, though, is its speed when used with Thunderbolt 3 or 4 connections on Apple computers. If this is what you use, you need one of these drives in your life to speed up one of the dullest bits of moviemaking. PRO MOVIEMAKER RATING: 9/10 Incredibly fast and compact SSD system for Mac users Pros: Build quality, transfer speeds Cons: Pricey for the size
“You can edit 4K, 8K and even 12K video directly from it”
SIZE UP The G40 is
much smaller and faster than the Pro-Blade
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PRO MOVIEMAKER
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