Overview
G-Technology may be a lesser-known brand at first glance, but when I say names like WD and SanDisk, you’re sure to know what I mean. Of the three interconnected brands, G-Drive is profiled as the premium one, aimed mainly at creators and MacOS users. Mobile Pro SSD is a new addition to the family, which will impress with its Thunderbolt 3 connection and extreme speeds well above 1 GB/s.
Mobile Pro SSD
The packaging is in a blue theme typical of the G-Technology brand. The white box shows the SSD itself as well as some basic specifications.
The package includes the SSD, the Thunderbolt 3 USB-C cable and short documentation. SSD uses the mentioned TB 3 with a throughput of 40 Gbps for transfers, which is significantly more than a classic modern USB with 10 Gbps.
The robust build, which is equipped with an aluminum core, serves as a heatsink. The larger dimensions of 112 × 80 × 17 mm and the weight of 199 grams have also been accompanied by increased resistance to falls, up to a height of 3 meters. The SSD should also handle pressure of up to 450 kg.
Comparing the dimensions will be most sensible with other external SSDs. In the picture below you can see the Samsung Portable T5, SanDisk Portable SSD, WD My Passport SSD 2020, Patriot PXD and WD Black P50 Game Drive. We also added SonnetTech Fusion Drive to the comparison, which is the only SSD with Thunderbolt 3 connectivity as well as the tested G-Drive. From the comparison, you can see that the Mobile Pro SSD is the widest and almost the longest. Only the P50 surpassed it in this dimension. It also took second place in thickness, here the Fusion Drive “wins” easily.
The G-Drive could therefore be described as the second least portable of the tested SSDs, but it is necessary to take into account the increased resistance and high speeds thanks to which it needs to be cooled. Without a proper heatsink, SSDs often reduce their performance, which is, of course, undesirable. Inside the SSD is NAND BiCS3 memory with 64 layers and TLC bit division. Theoretical speeds of up to 2800 MB/s are breathtaking. Only recently, I have been adoring the fact that we have exceeded the magical 1 GB/s with P50 and now we have almost three times the speed here. You could say that the Mobile Pro SSD has even better use than the P50, as there are more and more devices with Thunderbolt 3 and 4, but the special USB 3.2 gen 2×2 is almost nowhere to be found.
It is therefore interesting to compare with another TB3 SSD, the SonnetTech Fusion Drive. G-Drive is primarily intended for MacOS, but after formatting or installing the application from the manufacturer, it can normally be used in Windows. Another important piece of information, the manufacturer of the SSD offers up to a 5-year warranty.
Testing took place as always on the Intel Z390 platform, specifically on the Gigabyte Aorus Z390 Xtreme motherboard with the Intel Core i9-9900K processor and 32 GB 3600 MHz DDR4 Corsair Dominator Platinum, from which 25 GB was allocated to the RAM disk.
