SanDisk is a byword for storage solutions — external hard drives, thumb drives, memory cards, you name it, SanDisk makes it. Owned by Western Digital, the brand recently released the G-Drive, the latest it its Sandisk Professional series.

The review unit SanDisk lent me came with about 12 terabytes — 12 TB — of storage, and boasted of read/write speeds of 280 Mbps. To be clear, this is not a solid state hard drive, so it's the good old traditional hard drive, with a stack of plates between which the reading/writing pin would move. With 7,200 revolutions per minute, SanDisk classifies it an "enterprise-level" hard drive, and that's an assertion that's hard to argue with.

Who needs 12 TB of storage? I've been using my MacBook Air for about four years, and I've yet to fill a third of its 512 GB of on-board storage. My iPhone 14 Pro Max still has half its storage empty. I simply do not need such a humongous amount of storage, and neither do most casual users out there.

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So who really need these monster drives? Professional content creators — artists, photographers and videographers whose raw data can run into several terabytes. For them, the SanDisk Professional G-Drive will be a perfect fit.

What's in the box?

Apart from the intimidating hard drive itself — which easily rivals the size of the biggest George RR Martin novel and weighs twice as much — the box contains a power drive with two different types of adapters, a power cable (yes, with hard drives of this size, they need to be constantly running on power, unlike conventional, 1/2/4 TB hard drives), and a USB Type-C to Type-C cable.

The experience

For someone who's never used such an impressive piece of storage solution, the experience of actually using it was surprisingly smooth. It's simply plug and play. Plug it into your machine, turn on the hard drive, and you're good to go. While the advertised read/write speed is 280 Mbps, I found that it easily tops that speed, especially if the files being transferred are small in size. My entire library — videos, movies, songs, books, comics, and graphic novels — was transferred at around 450 Mbps to the hard drive, and barely took up two terabytes (don't laugh).

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Once you're done transferring files, you simply disconnect it from the computer, power it down, and that's it.

Now, SanDisk boasts of the extreme endurance levels this unit is capable of. It can take extreme levels of punishment, including drops from various heights onto various surfaces. I obviously did not test it, considering it was a loaner, but I'd take SanDisk at their word.

In conclusion

The SanDisk Professional G-Drive external hard drive comes in 4, 6, 12, 18, and 22 TB storage variants, starting at Rs 19,999. The unit I was lent was priced at Rs 41,990.

If your work involves heavy files and needs a robust storage solution that can withstand all kinds of punishment, then this is the hard drive for you. That is not to say this is the only hard drive in the market. Do your research, spend your money wisely, and may the force be with you.

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(Edited by : Shoma Bhattacharjee)