SanDisk Professional 20TB G-DRIVE PRO - Enterprise-Class Desktop Hard Drive, Thunderbolt 3, USB-C, 7200RPM Ultrastar Drive Inside - SDPH51J-020T-NBAAD

I talked to a friend and he mentioned you should be buying a SanDisk and what we found out is G Dr. is a SanDisk. It’s a good drive they work very well they’re quick fast and they just do the job I have a lot of these hard drives from my music workstation and they’re all mostly thunderbolt two interface drives and one of them has a USB but it’s just a good good drive I’m not gonna get anything else because I really like these drives and that’s it!

My purchase was for the G-Drive PRO, which is a mechanical hard drive, not an SSD. There are some reviews for this drive on Amazon that say the speeds are terrible. Do not listen to them. They do not understand that this is NOT an SSD, it is an enterprise class SATA mechanical hard drive in a TB3 case. The bottleneck here is the mechanical hard drive. There are people complaining that this is not a "40gb capable drive". This is laughable pure ignorance of the technology and what they purchased. The mechanical hard drive inside is NOWHERE near capable of 40gb speeds. If you need huge mass storage the G-Drive PRO is an excellent drive. If you need the absolute fastest speeds then you should buy the SSD version. Just do your research to understand the technology you are buying.

I've been buying G-technology (now SanDisk Pro) drives for more than a decade. When friends ask about external drives for video playback, photo storage, serious back-up, these are the drives I point them to first. I've never had one fail (ymmv), all of the drives I've ever purchased are still in operation by myself or a family member. The only reason I even buy new drives is I keep filling them up. The speed and stability is extremely reliable. I've never found the drive noise to be a problem, but if you need to do audio recording you will encounter read/write clicks, so placement is important. The only reason I don't give these a higher portability rating is because they are not bus powered (I would not expect them to be). If you do want to move these around our travel with them you will have to deal with the cabling, and if you do need to transport drives lots you should be familiar with proper care to avoid damaging the drive mechanism (these days, I'd drop the money on fast SSDs for travel). If you need speed and reliability, these are always a safe bet.

The storage is fine. It is the accessibility and speed that has issues. I find that I am having an issue with the use of the video files. Using a Mac Studio. When a video is open in the file the playback bar is missing until I switch and come back to it. This only happens sometimes. I also noticed it is a lot slower than using a SSD for storage. The upload/download times are noticeably different.

I have dozens of these drives for storing film footage. I used large LaCie drives for a while but had two of those freeze. (The Rugged ones seem more reliable). So far, over a period of years, these SanDisk drives have been solid and reliable which is all that I ask.

I bought this SanDisk Professional to replace a failing drive. I was able to copy the failing drives data to it and I've been very pleased with its responsiveness and performance so far. It's quiet and quick, just what I needed for photo and video editing!

WARNING!: This drive is not pro. Not in 2020, 2021, or 2022. It is advertised as a Thunderbolt 3 drive. However, it does not meet that standard's transfer speed (40Gb/s). Instead, it's actually a Thunderbolt 2 drive (20GB/s) transfer with a T3 cable. So half the transfer speed on a 12TB drive. Pro in 2020, 2021, 2022 is 40GB/s. We made the unfortunate discovery on a shoot when it was too late to get any alternates. The transfers were going alarmingly slow, even for HD footage. Upon investigating, the "fine print" on the box revealed the issue. I've spoken multiple times with GTech/Western Digital/Sandisk. They claim the drive functions "according to their" specification. However, it is not what anyone would expect from a drive advertised as Thunderbolt 3. Again, Thunderbolt 3 is 40Gb/s. So is "Pro". Furthermore, the drive is having issues. It repeatedly puts itself to sleep though system preferences are set to never do so. Anyone who edits understands how slow and harmful that can be.

Have been using it daily since March of 2022, some 16 months. No problems, fast storage and retrieval of data.