SanDisk Professional G-DRIVE 26TB desktop hard drive review

In a world where SSDs (Solid State Drives) seem to dominate all forms of data storage, it's easy to forget that traditional mechanical hard drives can still be a valuable asset. SSDs are great for small to medium capacities, but if you need to storge large volumes of data, a high-capacity hard drive is far more cost-effective than a pricey SSD. Although slower in terms of read/write speeds, if you're using it primarily for back-ups and long-term storage, an external desktop hard disk drive will fulfil such duties just fine.

Features

External hard drives don't get much more capacious than the SanDisk Professional G-Drive. A range of capacities are available, starting at 4TB (which is where external SSDs tend to top out), and rising to a gargantuan 26TB top capacity. It's the 26TB range-topper that we're testing here. To put 26 terabytes into perspective, a Canon EOS R5 II recording 8K RAW video consumes 18.2GB of storage space per minute of footage. You'd therefore need to shoot continuously for a full 24 hours at this video quality to fill 26 terabytes.

[Side note: due to the confusing and arguably deceptive way that hard drive manufacturers measure a 'terabyte' as being equal to 1000 gigabytes, not the correct 1024 gigabytes, the actual usable capacity of the '26' terabyte G-Drive is more like 23.6 terabytes. At least, that's the case when the drive is used with a Windows PC, and I'm not getting into the gigabyte vs. gibibyte debate.]

There are plenty of high-capacity desktop hard drives on the market, but the G-Drive sets itself apart by being aimed at professional users who need to store "mission-critical" data. It therefore uses an enterprise-level Western Digital Ultrastar hard drive, which spins at 7200rpm, making it faster than the typical 5400rpm speed of most modern 3.5" hard drives that prioritise low power consumption.

SanDisk claims a maximum 260MB/s read rate and an even faster 270MB/s peak write speed for the 26TB drive (the 22TB and 24TB capacities have an advertised 280MB/s read and write speed). That's not bad when you consider my first internal SSD - a Samsung SSD 830 from around 2012 - topped out at 520MB/s read and 400MB/s write, but only had 128GB of storage space.

A fast 10Gbps USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-C connection ensures the drive is far from bottlenecked by its interface, and even the status LED has 'bright', 'normal' and 'off' modes - a nice touch.

Build & handling

G-Drive external hard drives have always had a premium feel to them, and this latest version is no exception. The gunmetal grey portion of the casing is thick anodized aluminium and feels exceptionally solid. On the sides are mounting holes that allow the drive to be mounted with others in a rack or cart when used in professional environments, and there are rubber feet on the base which, combined with the drive's hefty 1.36kg weight, keep it securely anchored to any desk surface.

But it's not all good news. For some reason the drive has large ridged plastic panels on the top and bottom which feel cheap and flexible in comparison to the aluminium section. Compared to older desktop G-Drives which had full aluminium enclosures, this latest incarnation, though likely just as tough, just doesn't look or feel as special.

Unlike a portable, pocket-sized external hard drive, the SanDisk Professional G-Drive requires a dedicated power supply. That's normal for a desktop drive though.

Performance

The G-Drive comes pre-formatted in the Mac-specific APFS file system. This means it's got out-of-the-box Mac and Time Machine compatibility, but PC users such as myself will see nothing appear when the drive is plugged into a Windows computer. To fix this, you'll need to search for the 'Disk Management' utility within Windows and use that to reformat the drive to NTFS.

To test the G-Drive's maximum possible transfer speed I broke out my preferred storage benchmark app: CrystalDiskMark. This recorded a peak read speed of 282MB/s and a 284MB/s max write speed - even quicker than SanDisk's claimed 260MB/s read and 270MB/s write rates.

Great, but a benchmarking app represents a best-case data transfer scenario. For a more real-world read/write speed test I took a single large 36.2GB video file, as well as a 25.9GB folder full of small images, and moved both to and from the drive several times to see what sort of read and write speeds you can expect during typical use:

Moving multiple small files will always take a little longer than a single file of the same total size, so reduced transfer speeds are usually inevitable. However, the G-Drive managed almost identical read speeds with multiple small files as with a single large file. Write speeds were slower with small files, but not by much. It's also impressive just how close the drive gets in general use to its claimed maximum speed.

If I have one criticism, it's that it only takes a minute or two of idling before the G-Drive goes into a sleep state. I tested the drive using a fast laptop with USB4 to ensure no USB bottleneck, with the computer's power profile set to high performance, and with the laptop connected to mains power; there should have been no reason for the drive to go into a power-saving mode so readily. But when it does, you'll need to wait for almost 20 seconds for the drive to spin back up before it will respond. You simply don't get this delay with an SSD.

Verdict

Apart from its tendency to go into sleep mode too readily, my experience with the 26TB G-Drive was positive. I found its transfer speeds to be quicker than you might expect from a traditional mechanical hard drive. It also offers so much storage space you might not come close to filling it for years, while the solid casing (mostly) exudes quality. The default Mac-specific formatting is annoying if you'll be using the drive with Windows, but it's easy enough to change once you know how.

However, this is a premium drive aimed at professional users storing valuable work, and which will likely be used as a back-up drive. It therefore needs to be totally reliable, and though it proved to be just that during my relatively brief testing, there seem to be numerous customer reviews on multiple retail websites reporting drive failure.

Naturally, for every user leaving a negative review due to having just lost all their data, there'll likely be countless others who've had no problems with the drive and have therefore not been compelled to leave any review. However, the latter is true for any hard drive, yet the 26TB SanDisk Professional G-Drive currently has an average customer star rating of just 2.3 (based on over 50 reviews) on B&H, where comparable (and cheaper) drives score better.

Sure, this is anecdotal 'evidence', but it paints a concerning picture, and though the drive is backed by a 3-year warranty, that's of little comfort if you lose irreplaceable data. So although I was impressed by the SanDisk Professional G-Drive, I'm hesitant to recommend it as your sole means of data storage.