Sandisk Excessive Professional SSD with USB4 evaluation: Model and good efficiency — when it connects at full velocity

The Sandisk Excessive Professional SSD with USB4 is a good-looking, rugged, comparatively inexpensive exterior SSD with 40Gbps aspirations. We are saying aspirations, as a number of instances it related at solely 10Gbps or 5Gbps on our take a look at mattress. Even when related at 40Gbps, it was slower than the competitors.

What are the Sandisk Excessive Professional SSD with USB4’s options?

The Sandisk Excessive Professional SSD with USB4 is noticeably bigger than the older Excessive Professional SSDs, although it mimics them completely in form, type, and coloration. The drive is a relatively hefty 5.4–inches lengthy, by 2.2–inches broad, by 0.45-inches thick, and weighs round 5.4 ounces. Lest you mistake my intent, I like strong and hefty in an exterior SSD.

As you possibly can see under, it’s Sandisks favourite darkish grey with copper highlighting within the further giant lanyard opening. It’s largely masking in textured siliconec which offers a pleasant, comfy grip.

Clearly, the Sandisk Excessive Professional SSD with USB4 makes use of the USB4 protocol and it’s of the high-end 40Gbps selection. USB4 does enable 20Gbps implementations although we haven’t seen any. USB4 v2 will implement 80Gbps like Thunderbolt 5, however SSDs characteristic which can be a methods off. Thunderbolt 5 SSDs will be counted with the fingers on one hand in the intervening time.

Sandisk warranties the Excessive Professional SSD with USB4 for a full 5 years, although that’s mitigated by TBW. Sandisk didn’t say that, however we’re assuming that’s a situation, together with dropping it from a skyscraper, splitting it with an axe, and so on. Because the write velocity solely dropped to 550MBps off secondary cache, we’re assuming TLC, which is generally rated at 600TBW per terabyte of capability.

How a lot is the Sandisk Excessive Professional SSD with USB4?

The Sandisk Excessive Professional SSD with USB4 is out there in a 2TB mannequin for $280 and a 4TB mannequin for $430. That’s according to the pre-populated competitors akin to Adata’s SE920 and OWC 1M2, however not almost the cut price that’s the Corsair EX400U.

You can even roll your individual for significantly much less with one thing just like the Ugreen CM642. However after all, you may have the hassle of opening and putting in the SSD. In complete, value shouldn’t be a problem with the Excessive SSD Professional SSD with USB4 (Geez, I’m getting bored with typing that!). However there have been points.

How briskly is the Sandisk Excessive Professional SSD with USB4?

When it operated at full velocity, the Excessive Professional SSD with USB4 drive was quick, albeit not as quick because the competitors — it positioned final amongst some very quick USB4 SSDs. In our actual world switch exams, it additionally fell behind a few 20Gbps SSDs. Moreover, it had points connecting at full velocity on our take a look at mattress.

Utilizing the equipped cable (40Gbps brand’d) the Excessive Professional SSD with USB4 operated at solely 10Gbps on one among our take a look at mattress’s Thunderbolt 4 ports, and 5Gbps on the opposite. Home windows additionally warned that the drive may not carry out as USB4 ought to. Utilizing the identical cable on an M4 Mac Studio’s Thunderbolt 5 port gave the total 40Gbps.

Utilizing a brilliant high-quality Thunderbolt 5 cable, the Excessive Professional SSD with USB4 was capable of carry out and full testing at 40Gbps on the PCWorld take a look at mattress. Nevertheless, a second try with the identical Thunderbolt 5 cable produced the lowered speeds.

Be aware that USB4 (an marriage of Thunderbolt 4 and USB) continues to be in its infancy, so interoperability points aren’t startling, although these are the primary we’ve skilled. The drive would possibly carry out considerably higher and join extra reliably on different techniques. It did on my Mac Studio.

It is perhaps incompatibility with our take a look at mattress’s Thunderbolt 4 implementation, however we’ve by no means seen this from some other USB4 product. It is perhaps Sandisk’s hand-shaking or thermal administration that’s amiss. I requested each Sandisk and all of the Thunderbolt/USB4 folks I do know concerning the concern, however had not heard again as of this writing.

When related on the full 40Gbps, you possibly can see that the Sandisk Excessive Professional with USB4 was largely in tune with, if not fairly as much as the competitors in CrystalDiskMark 8’s sequential exams.

The foremost weak spot was in single queue/thread writing, which is the best way Home windows operates, These weak spot confirmed up on different exams.

In CrystalDiskMark 8’s random 4K exams, the Excessive Professional SSD with USB4 was once more, largely as much as snuff with the competitors, apart from the very disappointing single thread write rating. There’s a theme right here.

We repeated the only queue, single thread take a look at a number of instances to verify it wasn’t an aberration. It might need one thing to do with secondary cache administration because the rating doubled after we ran it by itself,. Nevertheless, 40MBps continues to be significantly slower than the competitors.

Once more, Home windows solely makes use of a single queue and thread (regardless of NVMe being a decade previous now) for writing knowledge so it’s not shocking that the Excessive Professional SSD with USB was off the tempo. It was really slower on this take a look at than a number of 20Gbps USB 3.2×2 SSDs.

Whereas not tragic, the Sandisk Excessive Professional with USB4’s 450GB write efficiency was middling at finest. Shut to a few minutes slower than the SE920 and once more, slower than a number of 20Gbps SSDs.

We have been a bit shocked that Sandisk didn’t pull extra velocity out of this unit. However the firm isn’t fairly pretty much as good with exterior SSDs as it’s with inner ones. And this isn’t the primary Sandisk SSD to have connection points.

Be aware that the majority SSDs are able to their marketed velocity — on sure techniques. AMD’s Thunderbolt 4 implementation is quicker than Intel’s. Our take a look at mattress is Intel, which we’ve stored static over greater than 100 exterior and inner SSD exams. All of the drives we’ve examined have had the identical “handicap”.

Ought to I purchase the Sandisk Excessive Professional with USB4?

The Excessive Professional SSD with USB4 is good-looking, rugged, feels nice in your mitts, is decently inexpensive for USB4, and is quicker than nearly all of USB 3.2×2 20Gbps SSDs.

That mentioned, the connection points are a crimson flag, and the 40Gbps competitors is quicker. Anticipate the second revision on this one. We’ll revisit this evaluation if and when the problem is resolved, or Sandisk sends us a better-behaved alternative unit.

How we take a look at

Our storage exams presently make the most of Home windows 11 (22H2) 64-bit working on a Z790 (PCIe 5.0) motherboard/i5-12400 CPU combo with two Kingston Fury 32GB DDR5 modules (64GB of reminiscence complete). Intel built-in graphics are used. The 48GB switch exams make the most of an ImDisk RAM disk taking on 58GB of the 64GB complete reminiscence. The 450GB file is transferred from a Samsung 990 Professional 2TB, which additionally accommodates the working system.

Every take a look at is carried out on a newly formatted and TRIM’d drive so the outcomes are optimum. Be aware that as any drive fills up, efficiency will lower as a consequence of much less NAND for secondary caching, and different elements.

The efficiency numbers proven apply solely to the drive we have been shipped in addition to the capability examined. SSD efficiency can range by capability as a consequence of extra or fewer chips to learn/write throughout and the quantity of NAND accessible for secondary caching (writing TLC/QLC as SLC). Distributors additionally sometimes swap parts. When you ever discover a big discrepancy between the efficiency you expertise and that which we report (techniques being roughly equal), by all means—tell us.