Today we are taking a look at an SSD from the SanDisk Professional line called the SanDisk Professional Pro-G40 announced in late 2022.
In the past, we have reviewed several SanDisk SSD drives, however, the drive that we are looking at today is part of SanDisk Professional previously known as G-Technology (the branding was changed back in mid-2021).
Design and build
The drive is fairly compact measuring 10.5cm long and weighing about 150g. The internals is encased in an aluminum core to protect them and dissipate heat (the unit does get a little hot but nothing too bad) and has a nice partial external rubber casing.
One thing this drive has that other Sandisk drives that we tested lack is an indicator light which will let you know that the drive is connected.
The SanDisk Professional Pro-G40 drive (with its short TB3 cable)
Performance
We tested the performance of the drive using our PC and M1 Macbook Air computers (the PC has a Core i9-9900K processor, 32GB of RAM, Asus RTX 2070, graphics, Gigabyte Designare Z390 motherboard with dual TB3 ports, and dual Samsung 970 NVME SSD drives).
When connected to the computer the drive is recognized as WD Black SN750E 2TB which tells us the type of NVMe used by Sandisk for this drive.
We started our testing with a synthetic benchmark in the form of Crystal Disk Mark 8 (ver. 8.0.4c) and the results that we got are actually quite a bit faster than the official Sandisk numbers (about 10% faster read and almost 30% faster write which is significant).
The Crystal Disk Mark 8 scores of the SanDisk Professional Pro-G40
Synthetic benchmarks are not really indicative of what actual performance you can get from a drive and so our main focus is going to be real-world transfer tests with large video files.
PC Transfer 123GB (TB3 connection)
- Read – 860MB/s average.
- Write – 1160MB/s average.
PC Transfer 124GB (USB C 3.1 connection)
We also performed a test when the drive was connected via USB 3.1 Gen 2 (10Gbps) on our NUC front USB-C (NUC10i5FNB) and we got the following results:
- Read – 465MB/s average.
- Write – 358MB/s average.
Please note that the drive only worked for us using a USB C to USB C cable into a USB 3 type C port and not via any type of USB C to USB-A cable, which was not recognized by the computer, so please keep this in mind.
The results are not impressive here but this might be something to do with this specific NUC unit or the port we used on the machine.
Finally, we performed a test on our MacBook Air M1 (132GB transfer)
- Read – 2030MB/s average.
- Write – 1609MB/s average.
With the MacBook, we see extremely impressive real-world results, significantly faster than our PC (this is the first time that we perform a Mac test so we can’t really compare this to other drives that we tested in the past).
Compared to the competition
We tested many SSD drives over the past several years. Compared to the Sandisk Extreme Pro SSD V2 that we tested in mid-2021 and uses a USB 3.2 Gen2x2 connection we are seeing 13% and 40% improvement in read and write speed respectively (although this might have more to do with the TB3 support than the speed of the drive itself).
Compared to the Lexar Balze SSD we tested last year, our previous SSD champion, the new Sandisk Pro drive shows between 6% and 32% improvement in read and write speed respectively (again the TB3 might be a big contributing factor to this difference).
The only drive that had ever performed better in our testing was the LaCie Rugged SSD Pro we tested in 2019 which is another TB3 drive. It reached a very impressive 2100MB/s read speed (81% better compared to the Sandisk Pro) but had a significantly slower write speed of only 750MB/s (12% slower than the Sandisk Pro).
* Please note that we only tested the LaCie Rugged SSD Pro on our PC (the M1 was not available in 2019 and we no longer have the drive).
The SanDisk Professional Pro-G40 and two other drives we tested
Conclusion
We are very impressed with the results that we got out of the Pro-G40. While it might not be realistic to get sustained real-world read/write numbers similar to those we got in our synthetic tests (true for pretty much any drive we ever tested) this drive produced the fastest real-world scores of any drive that we have tested to date using TB3 and for those for feel that time equals money paying an extra for this drive can certainly make sense as long as you have a Thunderbolt supported device.
Pricing
The drive currently comes in two capacities 1TB and 2TB and sells for $280 and $400 respectively.
We would very much like to see a 4TB version of this drive and we know many professionals will agree with us on this.
You can check out more LensVid exclusive articles and reviews on the following link.
Iddo Genuth 
You can support LensVid by shopping with our affiliate partners
Affiliates: Amazon, B&H, Adorama and E-bay.
Why should you trust us?