Customer Ratings & Reviews

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!

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)”.

I have no complaints about this drive. Has worked flawlessly. I use this drive to with my photoshop files. Writes and reads quickly. It is small and compact so it takes up very little space in my backpack. Only complaint that I have is the cord that comes with it. It is very short. Would have liked it to be just tad bit longer. Overall satisfied with this product.

Great compact external drive. I bought to replace another external drive that went bad in a year. This one has been holding up, small and compact and durable. It starts up every time I use it.

With my hobbie being taking a lot of wildlife, I'm outside a lot and needed something that was a little tough to make me feel better about getting my shots home. This little drive is quick and so far seems to fit the bill for what I wanted.

This is super fast and works great with Mac and windows

Comparatively to a flash drive or a portable HDD this is way faster. About on par with a regular 2.5 in sata 3 SSD. In case you're like me and forget that something's are OS specific this doesn't work out of the box with Windows. It will work after a format, which conviently they provide software to do so directly on the G-Drive website.

needed a portable external hard drive for photos, this was an affordable drive and works well

Geek Squad in my store recommended this drive to me. My laptop began telling me my hard drive was getting full. I have over 12K photos on my computer, clouds, and back-up hard drives but most of my pictures are irreplaceable. I was left all the pictures from my grandparents, my great-grandparents and many documents related them as well. This drive can hold them all until I finish organizing and deleting duplicate photos.

Use it for my DJ business and love it. Would recommend to others.

This does the job for photographers & those that just want to store things overall. I personally use it to broadcast music within my car.

The price was right, and this drive provides a safe, easy way for me to back-up some of my important computer files.

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

With sd cards getting huge capacities, why does anyone bother carrying around an external drive anymore, let alone a sold state one that has a fraction of the capacity? Because of the write speeds. Using CrystalDiskMark, I clocked my write speeds on this at over 400MBps. That sort of speed is necessary for installing programs to an external drive (because my tablet pc has limited storage) and still expect it to perform properly. The size of this thing is a real plus, since previously I was using an old full sized SSD in a cheapo enclosure. I did have to take away one star. Out of the box it wasn't recognized by my PC. The USB sound played, which meant that my computer was recognizing it, but no drives were mounted. Opening up Disk Management showed no drive letter, so I deleted the partitions and created a brand new volume. I guess it was preformatted for Macs, but since I know how to use a real computer it was easy enough for me to fix. I can just imagine the queue of angry, less tech-savvy customers unable to use their new external SSD, and all the returns processed despite nothing being wrong with the hardware itself (other than being preformatted for MacOS). Because of that, I can't really recommend to anyone not familiar with initializing disks and creating partitions, because it's way too easy to wipe the wrong drive in Disk Management. Otherwise it's an excellent portable drive, and I love that it comes with both USB type A and type C cords, both short enough to not get tangled in my bag.