It’s no secret that digital data is growing at an exponential rate. In order to protect your valuable business information, it’s important to have a reliable and affordable backup solution. You guys have heard me talk about storage and tech before, and I have another tech review. The G-DRIVE USB-C Hard Drive from Sandisk is a great option for those looking for an external storage device. This hard drive is fast, efficient, and easy to use. Let’s take a closer look at why the G-DRIVE USB-C Hard Drive is the perfect solution for your business backups! Featured above is the G-drive by Sandisk. I think it used to just be called G, but Sandisk looks like they bought them out. We just picked this up.
Until now, we’ve been using SSD cards as you’ve seen in my previous articles. We mostly use SSD drives by Samsung–the Samsung T7, the T5, and the T3. So we’ve been kind of going through the progression of those and they’re really fast. I love those because they’re portable, they’re safe, and they’re secure. But what about your home base? What about your office? What about your desk at home where you’re spending a lot of your time and you’re not going to travel with? I needed something that had a higher capacity than those SSDs, so that’s why I picked up this bad boy.
Is the G-DRIVE USB-C Hard Drive a Good Choice?
I would consider this on the budget side of external drives for your computer. They make the G-RAID drive, which is a higher-end version. They have a 24 terabyte, too. If you have one of those drives fail, everything is backed up on the other drive, which is neat. But if you’re looking for an entry point, which is what we were looking for for our content and the information we wanted to store, this is a good place to start. Twelve terabytes is a really large amount of storage, and because we’re using a lot of 4K footage in our YouTube videos and with our client videos, we’re starting to need a significant amount of storage.
By the way, if you want to build a YouTube channel and you need help creating content, uploading content, optimizing your content, or want to build your own YouTube following, let me know because that’s something that we can help you with. We’re helping a lot of other people with that now, but we needed to be able to have more storage.
What Makes the G-DRIVE USB-C Hard Drive Great?
So you may be looking at which drive to buy. You’re making considerations, and you found this article. Maybe you’re an existing follower of ours, or maybe you’ve read other articles of mine in the past, but know that I would never steer you wrong. The G-DRIVE USB-C Hard Drive is a great storage option for business owners with a lot of digital files and assets, especially creative professionals. Thre are tons of reasons to choose this particular drive, but the main factors in our decision were price, versatility, and capacity.
Price
The G-DRIVE USB-C hard drive is a mid-budget option for those who want to use it for personal data storage, but for professional use, it’s at the low end of the price spectrum for viable solutions. It costs around $400 for the 12TB capacity drive, which is the median capacity option. There are 4TB, 6TB, 18TB and 24TB options as well, with a price range of $185 for the 4TB and $620 for the 24TB.
Versatility
This particular drive, the G-DRIVE USB-C hard drive, has a lot of flexibility in terms of formatting, integration, and physical dimensions. For example, I learned something really neat about this from Ian: you can actually power a new Macbook pro with one of these things because it has the USB-C power cord. USB-C is becoming more and more ubiquitous in the Google ecosystem, but it also has started to move into the Apple ecosystem, making this particular drive ideal for both. You can choose the type of format that you want for the drive, from the universal exFAT to MacOS to APFS, and you can actually stack these drives on top of each other which makes physically storing them much easier. If you buy the G-RAID, it’s basically a case that you can kind of slide the drives into, further simplifying the storage.
Capacity
is important when you’re talking about a backup drive because you want to be able to store as much data as possible, and the G-Drive delivers on that front. It comes in sizes up to 24TB, which is more than enough for most people’s needs. this particular version is 12TB and we expect that it will cover most of our needs for a long time to come.
The G-Drive is also very fast, with a transfer rate of up to 240MB/s. This means that you can back up large amounts of data very quickly, which is important if you’re working with huge files or have a lot of data to backup. One final note on the G-Drive is that it comes with a limited warranty of three years. This isn’t the longest warranty we’ve seen, but it’s still good to have in case something goes wrong with the drive.
Cons of the G-DRIVE USB-C Hard Drive
Note that this does have an actual disc inside of it, unlike the solid-state so it’s not going to write quite as fast as a solid-state drive. It runs at 240 megabits per second on the box here, which is still fast but not quite as fast as the SSDs. Our t7 is right around a thousand, which is about five times faster than one of these. But if you have something just that you’re docking on your desk, this is a really good drive. It’s going to allow you to store everything you want, you just aren’t going to be able to work as efficiently. That’s why we’re not going to be working off of this – this is just where we’re going to back things up.
Best Use for the G-DRIVE USB-C Hard Drive
We had about six drives that we moved over to this as a backup – probably about six terabytes, maybe even seven terabytes of information. Lots of content! It took some time, but there was a lot of information to move over. Primarily, we wanted to back up our cloud storage. I’m doing this because cloud storage is very expensive, and if I’m going to continue to fill up my cloud storage, I want to try to get onto a lower plan so I’m not having to pay for five terabytes. I can maybe drop it down to one terabyte on the cloud and then have the rest of it on this backup just to be safe.
Final Thoughts
This drive is going to save us a ton of money long-term and it’s going to give us more storage capacity than we’ve ever had. It’s going to free up all the T7 drives that we can now use for other things when we’re traveling, so it’s going to give us a lot more freedom and versatility to go to new and exciting places as a brand. If you look at all our T7s, plus our computers and this drive, we should have close to 20 to 22 terabytes of data storage. This will last us quite some time, and that’s why I wanted to show it to you today. Thank you so much for reading! If you need an affordable budget drive, check out the SanDisk G-Drive on Amazon; that’s a good entry point. And then, if you really want to step up your game, you can go to the G-RAID drive which they have 24 terabytes. So if you’re not ready for that, go with this one. I’m Adrian Boysel and as always, keep looking up.
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