The SanDisk Professional Pro-G40 external SSD ($299.99 for 1TB, $449.99 for 2TB as tested) has two big things going for it: sizzling speed when used over a Thunderbolt 3 or 4 connection, and extreme ruggedness, including water, dust, drop, and crush protection. Like other SanDisk Professional solid-state drives, the Pro-G40 is geared to Mac users. That said, with a little effort it can be reformatted for use with Windows PCs, and you can get its full speed when paired with any computer benefits with a Thunderbolt 3 interface. It’s our Editors Choice pick among external SSDs for Mac-minded content creators who work in the field.
A Content Creator’s Delight
The Pro-G40 is a handsome gadget, black with silver trim. Beveled sides and corners give it an angular yet smooth feel; it’s rubberized on the sides and bottom. The drive measures 0.5 by 2.2 by 4.4 inches (HWD). The top is decorated with a raised silver SanDisk Professional name and logo, with drive information and certifications on the bottom. The drive mechanism is encased in an aluminum core, which helps with heat dissipation.
On one of the short sides is a Thunderbolt 3 port, and there’s a short (6-inch) Thunderbolt 3 cable in the box. You can also plug the Pro-G40 into a USB-C port, though it will fall back to USB 3.2 Gen 2 speeds as discussed below.
(Credit: Kyle Cobian)
The Pro-G40 comes preformatted in APFS, a macOS drive format that natively supports Mac Time Machine backups. All you need to do is launch Time Machine on your Mac and select the Pro-G40 as your backup drive. If you want to reformat the drive—as we had to do to test the G40 using the Windows-only NTFS and Windows- and Mac-compatible exFAT formats—it can be done, but requires some care.
The hitch is that the drive includes not only a data partition but a 200MB EFI system partition, which can sometimes be used to make a drive bootable but in most external Mac-formatted drives is used for firmware upgrades. You can’t remove this partition using Windows’ Disk Management utility (accessible by right-clicking the Start button), but you can delete it with a third-party utility or the command-line prompt DISKPART. The latter is a straightforward procedure, but you must be extremely careful not to accidentally delete other partitions—especially on your computer’s primary drive! That done, you can easily reformat the SanDisk SSD in NTFS or exFAT.
(Credit: Kyle Cobian)
Built to Take a Bruising
The sturdy Pro-G40 SSD is certified crushproof up to a pressure of 4,000 pounds (the weight of a small pickup truck) and can survive a drop of up to 9.7 feet. Its ingress protection rating of IP68 tells us it’s certified both dustproof (complete protection against sand, dirt, and dust) and waterproof to a depth of three feet for up to 30 minutes. Only a few external drives we’ve reviewed—among them the solid-state ADATA SE800 and platter-based ADATA HD830 External Hard Drive—can match the Pro-G40 in ruggedness.
The speed ratings listed in the table below apply when the Pro-G40 is connected to a computer’s Thunderbolt 3 port using the included cable or its equivalent.
When connected to a USB-C port, the drive delivers USB 3.2 Gen 2 speeds (rated at 1,050MBps read and 1,000MBps write), even if the port supports the faster (but rarely used) USB 3.2 Gen 2×2 standard as our Windows testbed does.
Testing the Pro-G40 SSD: Zippy Over Thunderbolt 3
We test external SSDs using PC Labs’ Windows 10 storage testbed, a desktop built on an Asus Prime X299 Deluxe motherboard with an Intel Core i9-10980XE Extreme Edition CPU. The system has 16GB of DDR4 Corsair Dominator RAM clocked to 3,600MHz and an Nvidia GeForce graphics card. We use its native 10GBps USB 3.2 Gen 2 port for testing compatible drives; for Gen 2×2 drives we use a Gen 2×2 port added via an Orico PCI Express expansion card.
We subjected the SanDisk Pro-G40 to our usual suite of external solid-state drive benchmarks comprising Crystal DiskMark 6.0, PCMark 10 Storage, BlackMagic’s Disk Speed Test, and our own folder transfer test. The first two are run on our Windows testbed with the drive formatted in NTFS, and the latter two on a 2016 MacBook Pro with the drive formatted in exFAT. Crystal DiskMark’s sequential speed tests provide a traditional measure of drive throughput, simulating best-case, straight-line transfers of large files. The PCMark 10 Storage test measures an SSD’s readiness for a wide variety of everyday tasks.
The Crystal DiskMark scores in our chart reflecting the Pro-G40’s performance over a USB 3.2 Gen 2 connection, which the drive defaults to even though our testbed supports a USB 3.2 Gen 2×2 link. I reran Crystal DiskMark on the drive when attached to my Dell XPS 13 laptop, which has Thunderbolt 3 connectivity, and got results of 2,652MBps read and 2,102MBps write, in line with its rated speeds. The Mac-based BlackMagic test results aren’t directly comparable to Crystal DiskMark, as the former tallies video read and write speeds, but the Pro-G40’s results are impressive, as is its 1-second time in our file copy exercise.
Verdict: Super-Rugged, Sizzling Speed
The worst thing we can say about the SanDisk Pro-G40 is that it’s not for everyone. SanDisk Professional drives are geared to designers and creative pros and priced accordingly. If your work is confined to the studio, you won’t need the extreme ruggedness this SSD provides. If your computer doesn’t support Thunderbolt 3, you can stop reading now, as there’s no sense paying for speed you can’t access. Although it can be used with a Windows PC, the Pro-G40 comes pre-formatted for Mac use with APFS.
(Credit: Kyle Cobian)
If, however, you’re a filmmaker or photographer on set or in the wild, the Pro-G40 has all the speed you’d want to offload, store, or transfer large files over a Thunderbolt 3 connection in a hurry. The drive can endure heavy rain, a sandstorm, repeated drops, or even being run over by a pickup truck (though we’ll have to take SanDisk’s word for that).
The closest rival to the Pro-G40 that we’ve reviewed is the LaCie Rugged SSD Pro, which earned an Editors’ Choice award in 2020. That drive also supports Thunderbolt 3, though its read speed in our BlackMagic test was lower than the SanDisk’s and its IP67 rating is slightly less waterproof. Moreover, the 1TB LaCie Rugged SSD Pro currently sells for $399, much more than the Pro-G40. For its blistering speed and unbeatable sturdiness, along with its relative cost-effectiveness, the SanDisk Professional Pro-G40 takes Editors’ Choice honors among ruggedized external solid-state drives.
SanDisk Professional Pro-G40 SSD
The Bottom Line
The Mac-centric SanDisk Professional Pro-G40 SSD, an external drive with sizzling speeds via Thunderbolt 3, is built to withstand anything the elements can throw at it.
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