It doesn’t take long to fill up your laptop’s hard drive when you’re shooting at fast frame rates or your recording 4K video. And if your computer begins to grind to a halt when you’re away from home, you’re stuck trying to work out what to delete. Thankfully, the problem can be avoided by adding an external storage drive to your kit. Solid state drives (SSD) make a nice choice because they are smaller and more shock-resistant than hard drives.
At just 86g/0.19lbs in weight and measuring 94 x 50 x 14.5mm (3.74 x 1.97 x 0.57-inches) you’ll hardly notice that you’re carrying the G-Technology G Drive Mobile SSD.
Rugged
Inside the G Drive Mobile SSD’s silky outer coating is an aluminium core for durability and to help prevent overheating. In addition, it’s ruggedised, which makes it a good choice for use away from home. As well as being IP67 water and dust resistant, it can survive being dropped from a height of up to 3m and has a crushproof rating of 1000lb.
G-Technology offers the G Drive Mobile SSD in three capacities, 500GB, 1TB or 2TB. It also has a USB-C port with a USB 3.1 Gen 2 interface which means that it can be used with the latest computers. However, as it’s supplied with both a USB-C/USB-C and USB-C/USB-A cables, it can be used with older machines as well.
G-Technology aims its products at Mac users, so the Mobile SSD comes formatted for use with Apple computers. However, the drive can be reformatted to suit Windows computers.
The claimed maximum transfer speed is 560MB/s and the G Drive Mobile SSD certainly doesn’t hang around. For example, it takes under 25 seconds to write over 10GB of images to it when it’s connected to the USB 3.0 port of a 2014 MacBook Pro. The same files only take around 55 seconds to write to a MacBook with a USB-C connection. That makes it a nice choice for storage while editing video.
Verdict
The G-Technology G Drive Mobile SSD has a silky-smooth outer coating but it feels solidly made and is ruggedised. It’s also backed by G-Technology’s 5-year limited warranty which gives you confidence in the purchase.
Although the supplied cables are a little shy of 14cm/5.51-inches long, they’re high-quality items.
Once connected, the drive mounts quickly and files transfer with impressive speed. It’s a great drive for photographers and videographers who need extra storage capacity away from home.