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G-Technology's G-Drive mobile Pro SSD external drive is aimed at professional users, offering super-fast transfer rates for jobs such as editing very high definition video editing in real time or VR rendering on the move using a combination of an NVMe SSD and Thunderbolt 3 interface.
The G-Drive mobile Pro SSD comes in two capacities; 500GB and 1TB, with an official transfer rate of up to 2,800MB/s for both models thanks to its combination of an M.2 NVMe drive and Thunderbolt 3 connection. The drive uses passive cooling in the shape of a hefty aluminium heatsink which provides most of the answer why an external drive that uses a M.2 format SSD weighs in at a substantial 1.04kg.
It's not only quick, it's also built to survive the rigours of being used on the road. As part of G-Technology's R-series of rugged drives it comes protected in a rubber feel case, designed to survive a 3-meter drop and up to 1000lb of crush.
G-Technology back the drive with a 5-yr limited warranty.
Physical Specifications:
Usable Capacities: 500GB.
NAND Components: SanDisk 64-layer 3D TLC.
Interface: Thunderbolt 3.
Form Factor: External.
NAND Controller: WD 8-channel NVMe.
Dimensions: 112 x 80 x 17mm.
Drive Weight: 1.04 kg.
Firmware Version: 10111RL.
G-Technology's G-Drive mobile Pro SSD comes in a stout box with a good clear image of the drive on the front. To the top right of the image is a sticker indicating the drive's capacity. Under the image are three icons that show that the drive is part of G-Technology's rugged R-series, the fact it has a Thunderbolt 3 interface and that it comes with a 5-year warranty.
The rear of the box has an illustration of the drives speed. Under this are three icons showing that the drive has an aluminium heatsink, supports 4K, 8K and VR workflows and that it's shock resistant. Under these icons are multilingual descriptions of these three features.
One side of the box carries a capacity sticker at the top along with logos for Thunderbolt3, Mac ready capability and another reminder of the 5-year warranty. The other side has yet more icons displaying box contents, compatibility and specifications.
The box bundle with the drive simply comprises a 0.5m Thunderbolt 3 cable, quick start guide, information card on how the drive is formatted and warranty info booklet.
As befits a drive labelled rugged, the G-Drive mobile Pro SSD comes housed in a protective case that has a rubberised feel. The case has slots cut into it to help dissipate the heat from the large aluminium heatsink that G-technology uses to help keep the SSD cool. This works well as even when we were pushing the drive under testing, it never got more than warm to the touch.
The CrystalDiskMark Info app recognises the SSD drive as a 500GB SanDisk Extreme Pro drive. The SanDisk Extreme Pro uses the same hardware as WD's Black NVMe drive; SanDisk 64-layer 3D TLC NAND combined with an in-house designed 8-channel controller.
The drive is powered via the Thunderbolt 3 connection and is only compatible with Thunderbolt 3 ports, it doesn't work when connected to a USB Type-C port. The end plate at the other end of the drive holds a white drive activity LED.
The drive came formatted with the HFS+ file system for Mac but for testing we re-formatted the drive to NTFS. To test the drive we used an Asus ThunderboltEX3 add-in card.
Thanks to Asus for their support with this. You can see more information on this card on the ASUS site, over HERE.
Crystalmark is a useful benchmark to measure theoretical performance levels of hard drives and SSD’s. We used v6.0 to test the drive.
Although the drive has a very fast official transfer rate, this is for Sequential performance. Random performance paints a different picture as the drive struggles with the small file tests of CrystalDiskMark particularly at deeper queue depths.
The ATTO Disk Benchmark performance measurement tool is compatible with Microsoft Windows. Measure your storage systems performance with various transfer sizes and test lengths for reads and writes. Several options are available to customize your performance measurement including queue depth, overlapped I/O and even a comparison mode with the option to run continuously.
Use ATTO Disk Benchmark to test any manufacturers RAID controllers, storage controllers, host adapters, hard drives and SSD drives and notice that ATTO products will consistently provide the highest level of performance to your storage.
The drive has stunning Sequential performance. Officially rated with a transfer rate of up to 2,800MB/s (based on read performance), we could confirm this figure with a tested read figure of 2,811MB/s. Tested writes came in at 2,337MB/s making the drive the fastest external drive we've tested to date.
AS SSD is a great free tool designed just for benching Solid State Drives. It performs an array of sequential read and write tests, as well as random read and write tests with sequential access times over a portion of the drive. AS SSD includes a sub suite of benchmarks with various file pattern algorithms but this is difficult in trying to judge accurate performance figures.
Using the more demanding ASSSD benchmark saw the Sequential reads drop to 2,504MB/s with writes at 2,211MB/s. Both of these figures make the G-Drive mobile Pro SSD the fastest single drive external device we have tested to date with the benchmark.
IOMeter is another open source synthetic benchmarking tool which is able to simulate the various loads placed on hard drive and solid state drive technology.
We set IOmeter up (as shown above) to test both backup and restore performance on a 100GB file.
As far as dealing with our backup/restore test, Samsung's X5 still rules the roost with the G-Drive mobile Pro SSD slipping into second place in the result graph.
Peak read throughput performance in our testing came at the end of the test with the drive producing 2,361.75MB/s, a little shy of the top official transfer rate figure of 2,800MB/s. Even so the G-Drive mobile Pro SSD is the fastest single drive equipped external unit we've seen to date.
The peak write throughput figure came a the 8MB block mark at 2,219.02MB/s.
To test real life performance of a drive we use a mix of folder/file types and by using the FastCopy utility (which gives a time as well as MB/s result) we record the performance of drive reading from & writing to a 256GB Samsung SSD850 PRO.
100GB data file.
60GB iso image.
60GB Steam folder – 29,521 files.
50GB File folder – 28,523 files.
12GB Movie folder – 24 files (mix of Blu-ray and 4K files).
10GB Photo folder – 621 files (mix of .png, raw and .jpeg images).
10GB Audio folder – 1,483 files (mix of mp3 and .flac files).
5GB (1.5bn pixel) photo.
BluRay movie.
The drive had no problems dealing with our real-life file transfer tests with the best performance coming when it was dealing with large file sizes.
To get a truer idea of how fast the G-Drive mobile Pro SSD is we took the SATA SSD out of the loop and instead tested the drive by running our file transfer tests to and from the drive using a 512GB Toshiba OCZ RD400 NVMe SSD.
With an NVMe drive in place, the file transfer rate rockets upwards breaking the 1GB/s mark when dealing with the larger file sizes. However the drive does struggle with the smaller file sizes contained in the 50GB File, 60GB Steam and 10GB Audio folders.
G-Technology are Western Digital's brand that offers high-performance storage solutions to meet the demands of the media and entertainment market segments with product lines from external drives for mobile users through to desktop docking stations. The G-Drive Mobile Pro SSD family are the flagship products of G-Technology's extensive range of mobile external drive's and are also branded as part of G-Technology's R-Series (R standing for rugged) drives.
With a combination of a fast performing NVMe SSD and a Thunderbolt 3 interface, the G-Drive mobile Pro SSD has an impressive turn of speed when it comes to Sequential performance. The official maximum transfer rate figure for the drive is up to 2,800MB/s (this is based on read performance). When tested with the ATTO benchmark the reviewed drive returned a read figure of 2,811MB/s. Incidentally the tested write figure was 2,337MB/s, both of these figures making the G-Drive mobile Pro SSD the fastest external drive we have tested to date in terms of throughput.
However the random 4K performance wasn't so impressive, as the drive struggled with the 4K tests in CrystalDiskMark at both shallow and deep queue depths. Then again the G-Drive mobile Pro SSD hasn't been designed to handle small bity file transfers but to move very large media files around and it does that very well.
Designed for the professional user handling 4K and 8K media including multi-stream 8K footage editing, we timed just how quick the drive was transferring these types of file to and from a NVMe SSD (512GB Toshiba OCZ RD400). A 16GB folder of raw 4K video scenes (8 scenes) took just 9.1 seconds to transfer to the Toshiba drive at 1,205MB/s and 9.9 seconds (1,116MB/s) to write back to the G-Drive mobile Pro SSD. A 40GB folder of 8K video's (11 clips) took a mere 20.4 seconds (1,060MB/s) to transfer to the Toshiba drive and 18 seconds to write back at 1,204MB/s.
As befitting a rugged drive, the G-Drive mobile Pro SSD is housed in a protective rubber-feel enclosure that protects it from a drop of up to 3 meters and a crush force of up to 1000lbs. The enclosure has a number of slots cut into it to help dissipate the heat from the large aluminium heatsink that G-Technology have used to keep the drive cool. This system works well as the drive didn't get beyond warm even when it was being pushed hard during testing.
We found the 500GB version of G-Technology's G-Drive mobile Pro SSD on Span.com for £270.00 (inc VAT) HERE
Pros
- Stunning Sequential performance.
- 5-year warranty.
- Shock protection.
Cons
- 4K random performance is disappointing.
Kitguru says: Designed to shift very large files around very quickly, G-Technology's G-Drive mobile Pro SSD 500GB drive does what it says on the tin, with the added bonus of being able to survive the rough and tumble of everyday life on the move.
