G-Technology - G-DRIVE Mobile SSD R-Series 500GB External USB 3.1 Gen 2 Portable Solid State Drive - Black/Silver

This is an extremely portable drive that is very fast as well as small and light weight, yet with a great solid build quality. It is perfect for me to transfer files from my main system and especially on the go. The combination of SSD and USB-C 3.1 Gen 2 is the perfect match. You get the stability and durability of solid state and the fantastic transfer speeds that USB-C offers. I was generally seeing a tick under the advertised 560MB/sec, but speeds were easily 4x to 5x faster than the speeds I was getting with my old drive. I love the real-world gains you can see and feel. Further, the drive itself is just well-built. Despite being light, it has a solid feel and the aluminum core provides a great deal of protection. It is IP67 water and dust resistant, has 3-meter drop protection and a 1000lb crushproof rating. Lastly, if an issue does arise, it comes with a 5 year warranty from G-Technology. Ultimately, I like everything about this drive. Small. Light. Solid. Very Fast. Dependable. Great Warranty. It protects my data and gives me back time with real-world speed gains. When you put all of that together you get a great drive and I think a great value.

PROS: - It’s a really nice portable size. You can tell it’s a tiny bit bigger than other portable SSD drives but that is because of it’s protective layer. - Speaking of that, I love how its made to be water/dust/shock resistant. When buying a portable drive, you want it to protect your files and it really adds that extra layer. - After set up, this SSD is a breeze! It is very fast and efficient to use. CONS: - This device was not a simple plug in and use. I had to whipe the drive and then set it up within my computer’s settings. G-Drive provided easy enough directions on their website but I’d imagine some less tech savvy people it would be difficult. BOTTOM LINE: You will be very happy with this purchase. After set up, this drive is a great SSD to protect your files at home or on the go.

While there are definitely cheaper and larger storage “platter” USB drives available, in my opinion, they will not give you the peace of mind this drive will. Bottom line is it’s a very fast, very durable external drive especially suited for “road warriors”. Drive is preformatted for Mac OS. If you don’t reformat the drive when you try to use in Windows it wont show up in your drive list using file explorer but will in file manager – but it is unusable. So if you are going to use in Windows you will need to reformat it. If you aren’t comfortable using windows file manager or 3rd party partition software WD does provide software to reformat (I was provided with this link from WD) https://www.g-technology.com/campaign/landing/windows-paragon. I did download/install it and once started it will ask you to name drive, assign letter and stated it would re-format drive to NTFS. It does keep the drive as GPT (can have any number of partitions as opposed to MBR which basically allows just 2). You can also find the software “Windows Wizard(zip)”if you drill down in g-technology.com website - which is given in the manual. https://www.g-technology.com/products/portable/g-drive-mobile-ssd-r-series#0G06052 If you don’t plan on using multiple partitions and don’t want to waste drive space due to GPT overhead you can change to MBR - or if you don’t want to use NTFS - you will have to use windows file manager, or free partition software such as MiniTool Partition, to change. In the box is; Minimal instruction manual. G-Drive (manufactured by WD) Comes with a USB-C to USB-C and a USB-C to USB 3.0/2.0 cables. The 2 cables are a tad over 4 ½ inches in length. Positives; The drive is nicely constructed with a protective aluminum core which is stated to help prevent overheating and maintain high performance. The enclosure, while not “soft” has slots that are also supposed to insulate the drive when in use. I found it a pleasing form/shape. Exact size of drive is 3.74” x 1.97” x 0.57” and easily fits in your hand/pocket. It is built to be tossed around and states it can be dropped from 10 feet, is water/dust resistant and has a 1000lb crush point. I have to say that I did not test any of these but given its construction I don’t doubt its claims. Given its size I did a little digging and it seems that it is using an M.2 SSD, although I could not found out the exact “model”. I have previously tested internal WD (Western Digital) 500GB blue SSD and Samsung EVO 860 500GB drives using CrystalDiskMark. This drive is faster than both of these internal drives! What I found interesting is that the drive was slightly faster using USB 3.1 than USB C? Not much faster but I would have expected the other way around. This bodes well for those that don’t have USB C and will be using 3.1 for connection. I used my laptop, a Samsung Notebook 9 pro, with nothing else running but the test. Since I can only attach 2 pictures for review - they are G-drives scores using USB 3.1 and USB-C. I did not notice any change in temp on the drive when running my speed tests. 5 year limited warranty Negatives; Provided cables are a tad short at just over 4 ½ inches. They worked fine with my laptop but if you have a desktop with the USB connections in front – I suspect the drive will be suspended in the air. Or as with my desktop where the USB connections are on top - the drive is not flat and is on-end, kind of in a half loop. Activity light is on the bottom of the drive, so just a tad hard to see, especially if using desktop as noted prior. Does not come with any software. My biggest issue was with drives formatting. It comes pre-formatted for use in MAC OS (apple) which isn’t a big deal to reformat but to me this isn’t made clear - other than a little “blurb” on the side of the box where it mentions Windows and states “(via reformat)”.

Pros: * Very fast performance. * SSD so no moving parts and very reliable. * Rugged enough to toss in a bag and not worry. Cons: * Compact but not tiny. * Pre-formatted for Mac only. This compact, rugged external drive provides external storage for on-the-go use. Being an SSD rather than a hard drive, there are no moving parts. You can freely toss it in a bag and not worry about the safety of your data on the drive. It’s like an elephant (legendary memory and strong) in a compact frame. The drive comes with two USB-C stubby cables; both with USB-C on one end for the drive and the other end is either USB-A or C depending on what you need to connect it to. My only complaint on the drive is that it was pre-formatted for Mac only. I had to reformat it for use on both Mac and Windows platforms, but that’s a minor issue. 0.5TB in a compact, fast and rugged little box. Very nice!

As a photographer and Videographer that shoots in the field, it is ever important to me to have reliable fast data transfer and storage. With SSD drives becoming more user accessible, now is the time to upgrade your storage and never look back. The speed at which you can read and write to SSD’s over the older spinning hard drives is of no comparison. This drive boasts transfer speeds up to 560MB/s. Gone are the days of waiting for older hard drives to spin up. With SSD’s your editing becomes an extension of your creativity, not a hindrance. I am using this drive to edit 4K footage in Premiere Pro. Granted I use proxies to make scrubbing buttery smooth, the playback and speed of this external drive is the same as editing from an internal SSD. This drive utilizes the USB C interface and plugs into my laptops USB C port natively, making it VERY fast and extremely efficient. It also comes with the older USB 3.0/2.0 cable in case your system does not include a USB C port. Reliability is also extremely important when choosing storage. G-Drive (owned and operated by Western Digital) has garnered a great reputation and have become a go-to drive for my professional and personal needs. Size and weight are also important when lugging around gear and the G-Drive external SSD literally fits the bill in this category. Measuring roughly 2x4 inches and weighing only 90 grams, this drive is the ultimate in portability. You won’t even know it’s in your case, so be sure to double check before you leave! Build quality is top notch. With IP67 dust and water resistance, this is yet another reason to choose this product if you shoot in the field. Very tough indeed. One thing to note is that if you plan on using this drive on a Windows 10 machine, you will need to download the free “G-Technology Format Wizard” software from their website to format the drive before initial use. This is a straightforward and very easy process. All in all, I can’t say enough good things about the G-Drive external SSD. It’s small, light, rugged, FAST, and reliable. Not to mention extremely affordable. All the best features are covered here. It’s a 100% no brainer.

I am a fanatic about backing up my digital files. I have done so since the beginning with tons of floppy drives, moving on to Zip drives, archival DVDs, and as they have been advancing, portable hard drives. I recognized early on that with our increasingly digital world, I needed (as do most people), a way to hold everything 'just in case'. I also witnessed a colleague lose ALL of his Master's degree work, including his thesis, and I've never seen a man so broken before or since. He was wicked smart when it came to math, but stupid when it came to computers. I have a huge amount of digital files both for my personal items (iTunes music, movies, RAW photo files, important document scans, etc.), as well as for my work files. I'm a teacher and unlike many my age who have two or three (or in one case ten) filing cabinets full of documents and stuff, I have everything digital. I have high-def multimedia files so I don't have to try streaming them over unreliable wi-fi in the school (kids are all using up the bandwidth sharing Instagram pictures of themselves in class, like, we know, you're in class). I recently purchased the SanDisk Extreme Portable drive for use with my work files because it is fast, light, and easy to take around. I got the G-Drive for my home archive. BTW in case you didn't know, SanDisk (whom I've always loved their stuff) and G-Technology (same) are both owned by Western Digital now and these are part of the 'stable' of products. (Sorry, not sorry, for the detour into the why and what of data management.) Now as to the G-Drive itself, it is awesome. It is freakishly fast and nice and solid. It comes with all the cords you could need for connecting it to your computer and it does it's job incredibly well. I had kind of hoped that in the pictures I saw online, that the blue you could see between the slats on the drive were indicator lights to show how full the drive was but really you are just looking through the case to see the heatsink around the memory core. Bummer, but it still looks nice. The one thing I have to say about these new drives and the incredible speed we get now is that you now have the ability to do a final backup in the case of an emergency in little to no time. I used to have a schedule for making quarterly rolling back-ups but I was able to do my most recent backup in a couple of minutes! This gives me the peace of mind to know that if I perhaps missed a backup or know that I had recently added a bunch of files that I would want, that I could get them in record time after popping this thing out of the safe. One thing you will notice from the other reviews here is that this G-Technology drive is formatted for Macs right out of the box. G-Drives have been a staple in the Mac world for years (they make my Thunderbolt Time Machine drive). It is not very hard to reformat the drive using their software and you can even use it on both a Windows and Mac if you reformat it to the exFAT format. That being said, you do lose quite a bit of speed from this drive by not using it in a native Windows or Mac format (NTFS or APFS/HFS+, respectively). This is my backup drive for my home computer which is an iMac so it is in APFS; the SanDisk is for my work computer which is a Windows 10 Laptop so it is in NTFS. I use USB thumb drives in exFAT format (which IMHO all USB thumb drives should be formatted in), for transferring files between the two if needed. OK, so this 'review' hopefully was more about convincing you that you need this, but if you are reading this, you probably already know that. I didn't spend much time on the actual drive because it does what it is supposed to incredibly well, period. It does nothing super fancy but I don't need or want that out of an external drive. Like I said earlier, I have always loved G-Technology and SanDisk drives and this drive (and my recent SanDisk purchase) have only reinforced that feeling. If you need a portable external drive, you can not go wrong with this G-Drive.

The G Drive Mobile SSD R Series 500GB is my first experience with a portable external hard-drive. I have in the past used "another" major external hard drive product which gave me many years of trouble-free service. I used to back up my Mac computer with the "other" device and the external hard drive (even when new) always saved data at what I call a snails pace. Enter the G Drive Mobile DDS R Series product. To sum up the performance and speed of this device, I would have to say "BLAZING FAST"! No comparison. Solid state hard drives win every time. I backed up nearly 12,000 photographs and then went onto backing up nearly 50 GB of data in the blink of an eye. SATA drives move over as you have now met your match. Out of the box the G Drive mobile SSD is not ready to back up a Windows platformed computer. You will have to format the device prior to your first backup and you will need to download the G Technology Format Wizard. For those consumers that are not computer literate, the download for the format wizard is easy and is a no brainer, so be sure to visit the manufacturers web page to download the correct application. If you are a Mac computer owner, no formatting is needed. The G Drive claims that the product is rugged, but I have no way of home testing it. The product is backed by a 5 year limited warranty which seems very generous. This product is on my recommended list.

I have several flash drives that I carry off and on depending on what I am working on: a Mushkin 32GB USB 3.0 and a Sandisk 64GB combo USB 3/3.1. The Mushkin is pretty old but has held up very well and has proven itself to be very fast and reliable. After using the G-Drive R-series, I now have a drive with enough capacity to really fit some of the projects I work on and yet it is still nice and small. Maybe not as small as a pocket flash drive, but with its speed and capacity, I may find myself sticking it in once in a while! When I ran Crystal Disk Mark 6, I was impressed by the speed of the drive. It performed very well compared to the SSD in my Dell G7 laptop, getting very close in speed on a couple of the tests. I did some real-world testing before starting to use it as well, backing up a folder of pictures (996MB) in only 11 seconds. In other uses, it has proven to be very fast in both large and small file transfers. When I first took it out of the box, I tried it on three machines and could not see it in Windows file explorer or my Chromebook's file browser. After doing a little digging online, I found out that they have designed it to work out of the box for Mac machines, but it needs to re-partitioned to work with Windows. I found that kind of odd, since it is marketed as "rugged, super-fast portable storage" and lists both Mac and Windows compatibility. After looking closer, I did find on the side of the box that under the Windows compatibility it does have "w/ reformat" in very small writing. I was able to talk with one of the techs from Western Digital and she did confirm that it does need to be set up if it is going to be used on a Windows machine. No big deal, if you have set up new drives before, it is a simple process. Just make sure you pick the right drive before deleting and creating the partitions! I am very happy with the drive and will be using it for anything that needs speed or capacity in the future. With a five-year warranty and since Western Digital is behind it, I expect it to last me at least as long as my trusty Mushkin has! They also offer even larger drives if needed, it is really nice to see these kind of drives finally becoming reality in this compact package.