SanDisk Professional 12TB G-DRIVE PRO - Enterprise-Class Desktop Hard Drive, Thunderbolt 3, USB-C, 7200RPM Ultrastar Drive Inside - SDPH51J-012T-NBAAD

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.

This fast external drive has helped power (one at a time) other SanDisk external SSDs to better performance on my iMac system. Problems I had copying a large 3.8 TB photos library were resolved when that external SSD where the library was located was connected to the daisy-chain power supply from this G-Drive. I was able to overcome the previously dead-ended MacOS error Code -36 issues.This G-Drive's speed is also adequate to edit and render 60+ minute 4K videos on its external storage without dropping / hesitation. The 7.68 TB it permits has allowed me to rearrange and clean up files on other drives (2x4TB and 4x5TB) to make the most of the space they offer. Also, I've placed a cloud Sync drive onto it, which is permitting streaming upload of my large files - pics and videos, etc. (One has to rename the "Photos Library.photoslibrary" file to allow the contents to be copied up, as Sync does not allow the copy of library files).The result? This is like another level power boost to my iMac (2019) 1TB internal SSD, 3.6 GHz 8-Core Intel Core i9, Radeon Pro Vega 48-8GB + 32GB 2667 MHz DDR4 Ram system, now operating on MacOS Sonoma 14.4.Seems a bit costly, but I have been blessed to have the $ resource to be able to have made the jump to purchase it.The integrity of this drive vs data loss is another strong characteristic that affirms my delight in this purchase.

I have two of these. My first had the correct connectors for my computer and is very fast and works with no problems. This device I ordered to back up my data. Although listed as the same in the description, it came with two Thunderbolt connectors which are no good on my PC. I did not return it because I waited until I needed it some weeks later and the return window was closed. Their fault for sending the wrong drive; my fault for not checking in time. I highly recommend the drive - if the send you the right one.

I took a chance and bought this from the used/return pile for $120 cheaper. I think I got a good deal (fingers crossed). I backed up all three 2TB drives I have on my Lenovo P17, so I could replace them with 4 TB drives. That worked flawlessly. HOWEVER, I had assumed that I would also be able to connect this drive to my slightly older Lenovo P50 which has a regular USB-C port. I had assumed it would just be slower. But, no, it did NOT recognize the drive at all, not even under Disk Management. I tried several cords and concluded that this device ONLY works with a "real" Thunderbolt port and "real" Thunderport cable (look for the lightning bolt). I would be happy if someone would tell me I'm wrong, because, for me, having a backup means you should be able to read your data with your old laptop if your new laptop gets lost or stolen.I didn't even notice that this thing has a slot for an additional "pro-blade" drive, which could be useful. Most of my data are high-res photo scans and videos, so it would be nice to have different libraries on different pro-blades, but again, only if I can access them from more than one computer... and if the price for those came way down.

I have recently purchased this particular external storage for my photography, I have other smaller externals from OWC, LaCie and SanDisk. But they are were more for my MacBook and this particular G-Drive I got to back up both my Photo's and my iMac. So now I'm reasonably safe with my Data. Of course I just found out that my video card is beginning to die, just perfect!

The drive is excellent, but must be formatted for Windows. The online User Manual for this drive (G-Drive) at westerndigital.com contains detailed instructions to perform this step. The instructions refer to a Command Line prompt available by right-clicking the Start Menu, but I did not see this option for Windows 11. Instead, I use the [windows]+R key to bring up the command prompt. That allowed the necessary commands to be entered and the drive ultimately formatted correctly.