Write
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.
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.
Write: practical tests
Practical tests in Windows show us that the G-Drive lags a bit behind the P50, which is a surprise. With large 9 GB and 24–36 MB files, it loses 13/11%, which is noticeable. We noticed worse results with 5–10 MB and especially smaller 427–1235 kB files, where the G-Drive fell to the third and even sixth place, which is surpassed even by cheaper SSDs with USB connection. However, the G-Drive starred with the smallest 12–59 kB files, where all SSDs except the PXD reach poor speeds. In this test, it is about three times faster than the competition, but it also has a third of the performance of the PXD.
Zápis: syntetické testy
Synthetic write tests more or less confirm the findings from practical tests and thus the high speed in sequential writing, but weaker results in medium-sized files. The slower access time is also surprising. The question is whether this was not caused by the utility for reading the HFS storage, or by some problem with the TB3 driver on the tested motherboard.
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.
Read: practical tests
Concerns about testing the drive correctly disappeared immediately when looking at the read. Here, the G-Drive won in basically all tests except the smallest 12–59 kB files, where the PXD has an above-average result. But let’s go gradually. The 9 GB file was transferred the fastest of the tested disks at a speed of 1445 MB/s, which is 5% more than with Fusion Drive. The fastest USB SSD, the P50, is up to 76% slower. We see the same 5% difference with 24–36 MB files, where we also exceeded 1 GB/s. The P50 lags here by 52%. Just below the 1 GB/s limit is the transfer of 5–10 MB files, where the difference compared to Fusion Drive is only 1%. The lead over the P50 also decreased to 37%. We also see a very good result with 427–1235 kB files, where the G-Drive achieves a 32% lead over the second fastest PXD. The smallest files are the fastest on the PXD, the G-Drive loses by 30%. So we can see that the SSD works properly and the slower writing in the previous chapter is real and not a wrong result, as I feared.
Read: synthetic tests
Synthetic reading tests are, except for one, fully in the hands of the G-Drive. In the sequential test we see almost 2 GB/s and a great result is also with 4K (64 threads), where the G-Drive is up to 3 times faster than the second fastest SSD. The access time of only 0.037 s is also great. 4K read is the only thing that the Mobile Pro SSD lags behind the P50, by 58%, which in practice is a difference of 13 MB/s.
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.
Overall score and performance on macOS
The overall score shows the victory of G-Drive over the P50, where reading weighed mostly. Tests in the macOS home environment again show a victory with great values of 2.4 GB/s for reading and 2.2 GB/s for writing.
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.
Rating
Unlike WD or SanDisk, G-Technology products are aimed at a specific category of users, such as graphic artists, video editors, etc. Such users require state-of-the-art work tools that allow them to do their jobs faster and more efficiently. G-Drive Mobile Pro SSD is designed specifically for such demanding users, who will be able to process photos and videos in up to 8K resolution without large files taking up valuable space on the internal storage of their laptop. In the field, they will appreciate the increased resistance to falls and external pressure.
The speed of reading is really great, in the benchmarks it reached more than 2 GB/s, in practical tests 1.5–1 GB/s depending on the size of the files. If I can blame something, those are writes that are not as fast as might be expected and the SSD no longer occupied the first place for medium-sized and smaller files. I must also point out the 40 GB buffer that I noticed during the 300 GB video transfer test. At the beginning of the test, the transfer speed was up to 900 MB/s, but then dropped to approximately 360 MB/s and was maintained at this speed until the rest of the test. In reality, the SSD will serve primarily for moving a lot of data once and then their processing, where it will be possible to use high read speeds. However, if you often need to write large amounts of data, other tested drives have performed slightly better in this area.
In the end, all I have left to say is the 5-year warranty and the price, which is as high as is customary with Thunderbolt 3 devices. It is also true that you use the drive only with TB 3 devices, it does not offer compatibility with classic USB type C.
| G-Technology G-Drive Mobile Pro SSD |
| + high read speed |
| + body resistant to falls and shock |
| + 5-year warranty |
| - higher price |
| - write speeds could be higher in practice + 40 GB buffer |