Price When Reviewed

$49.99 for dock I $159.99 w/1TB Mag I $219.99 w/2TB I $339.99 w/4TB

Best Prices Today: Sandisk Pro-Blade Transport

$159.99

If you’re on the lookout for a quick, modern, detachable media storage system, Sandisk’s $50 Pro-Blade Transport with its modular SSD cartridges ($120/1TB to $300/4TB) has you coated.

Why modular/detachable? So you’ll be able to rotate backup media, retailer copies off-site, in addition to segregate separate initiatives onto their very own discrete media. Modular additionally means that you can develop your TB rely over the identical connection so you’ve got slim, and on this case, good-looking cartridges, as litter quite than a slew of bigger drives.

Further studying: See our roundup of the best external drives to find out about competing merchandise.

What are the Pro Blade’s design and options?

The Pro-Blade Transport system is predicated round a classy $50, moveable docking unit, the “Transport,” which measures roughly 5.1-inches lengthy, by 2.8-inches vast, by somewhat over 0.6-inches excessive. It weighs just below 6 ounces.

The 20Gbps USB Type-C-connected Transport contains a single slim bay/port that accepts skinny SSD modules known as “Mags” (little doubt brief for journal — as in firearms), that are solely 4.3-inches lengthy, by 1.1-inches vast, by 0.3-inches thick. If that appears terrible near the dimensions of a 2280 NVMe SSD, that’s undoubtedly what’s inside.

Note that whereas Sandisk after all gained’t encourage it, and it’ll seemingly break your five-year guarantee, you can take away the SSD from the cartridge if for some cause the dock goes stomach up and you really want the info.

The Mags can be found at $120 for 1TB, $180 for 2TB, and $300 for 4TB. When I used to be first requested about reviewing the system, I used to be anticipating increased boutique pricing and whereas these costs are cheap, they’re closely discounted from the official MSRP.

Understandably, we just like the decrease costs. Often the reductions of main vendor’s grasp round fairly some time. Here’s hoping.

Interestingly sufficient, the Pro-Blade Mags that Sandisk despatched us had been formatted to Apple’s APFS. That says an entire lot concerning the target market — a target market used to paying fairly a bit extra.

But that is PCWorld, and Windows customers with a necessity for quick rotating media backup or library storage may also have an interest within the Pro-Blade Transport system.

How quick is the Pro Blade system?

The Pro-Blade Transport system with the 2TB Mag put in that we examined was no slouch throughout the 20Gbps USB bus — lagging behind solely OWC’s outstanding 1M2 (a 40Gbps drive examined at 20Gbps) and USB4/Thunderbolt fashions in total efficiency.

We, after all, would’ve favored to see Sandisk go for 40Gbps USB4, which the TLC NVMe SSDs contained in the Mags can deal with simply. But 40Gbps ports are nonetheless a really uncommon commodity and upping the velocity would little doubt have elevated the value of the Transport.

20Gbps interprets to roughly 2GBps sustained transfers, which remains to be very quick, but with lowered energy consumption and decrease working temperatures in comparison with 40Gbps choices akin to USB4 and Thunderbolt 3/4. These are usually not petty issues.

Below you’ll be able to see that the Pro-Blade Transport did very effectively in CrystalDiskMark 8’s sequential assessments. The single-queue, single-thread sequential learn was a tad disappointing, however the different scores had been prime notch.

Random 4K efficiency suffered no main letdowns, with the Pro-Blade Transport sustaining the tempo in each particular person take a look at — excepting its loss to the improbable Express 1M2 within the random learn.

The Pro-Blade Transport additionally did very effectively in our real-world 48GB transfers, ending just a few seconds behind the OWC 1M2.

The Sandisk Pro Blade maintained throughput over the whole thing of our 450GB write, and given sufficient time to reassemble the secondary cache, was in a position to keep this tempo even with the 2TB magazine approaching full capability.

Alas, I did run into some points throughout testing of the Pro-Blade system. First it crashed AS SSD 2.0 throughout its 4K/64 thread take a look at utilizing a 10GB information set when all assessments had been run on the similar time.

This is one thing I’ve by no means seen earlier than, and am discussing the matter with Sandisk. If I needed to guess, it had one thing to do with caching as I used to be in a position to full the 10GB 4K/64 thread and entry time assessments if run individually. AS SSD didn’t crash with the smaller 1GB information set employed.

Also, there have been no points with the 10GB information set on our older AMD storage take a look at mattress. Perhaps it’s an remoted compatibility problem with the present take a look at mattress (see the top of the article for an outline).

However, underneath the stress of deleting one 450GB file, then instantly attempting to jot down it again, the copy course of hung and tousled issues to the purpose that Task Manager wouldn’t open. I needed to shut down the system utilizing a 10-second energy button press then restart to get issues going once more. Upon reboot, disk supervisor advised me the drive wanted initializing, however then threw an error after I tried.

It was at this level that I made a decision to unplug the Transport then plug it in once more. Voila! The drive was again to regular, and extra importantly for this dialogue — all the info was intact. If it had not been, you would kiss one other half star goodbye.

While none of those glitches had been deadly, nor more likely to happen to the common consumer, the Pro-Blade Transport firmware seemingly wants some wonderful tuning. No doubt, detachable/modular is extra finicky than static storage, however I needed to dock that first half star.

Note that the Pro-Blade Transport carried out flawlessly on my Mac Studio with macOS and the Mag formatted to APFS, albeit underneath significantly much less stress.

Should you purchase the Sandisk Pro-Blade Transport system?

Yes! If you’re prepared to just accept the prospect of an occasional non-fatal operational inconsistency and the discounted costs are nonetheless obtainable. The system may very well be an exquisite addition to any prosumer or intense hobbyist setup.

But on the full retail value, you’re paying a hefty premium for what is basically a housekeeping comfort. It’s additionally quite a bit to pay given the the glitches I skilled.

I’ll retest and replace this assessment as soon as Sandisk ameliorates the problems I skilled.

How we take a look at

Storage system assessments at present make the most of Windows 11, 64-bit working on an X790 (PCIe 4.0/5.0) motherboard/i5-12400 CPU combo with two Kingston Fury 32GB DDR5 4800MHz modules (64GB of reminiscence whole). Both 20Gbps USB and Thunderbolt 4 are built-in to the again panel and Intel CPU/GPU graphics are used. The 48GB switch assessments make the most of an ImDisk RAM disk taking on 58GB of the 64GB of whole reminiscence. The 450GB file is transferred from a 2TB Samsung 990 Pro which additionally runs the OS.

Each take a look at is carried out on a newly formatted and TRIM’d drive so the outcomes are optimum. Note that in regular use, as a drive fills up, efficiency might lower as a result of much less NAND for secondary caching, in addition to different components. This is much less of an element with the present crop of SSDs with their far quicker NAND.

Caveat: The efficiency numbers proven apply solely to the drive we had been shipped and to the capability examined. SSD efficiency can and can fluctuate by capability as a result of extra or fewer chips to shotgun reads/writes throughout and the quantity of NAND obtainable for secondary caching. Vendors additionally sometimes swap parts. If you ever discover a big discrepancy between the efficiency you expertise and that which we report, by all means, tell us.