SanDisk 500GB Extreme Portable External SSD – SDSSDE60-500G-G25

PROS: Nice price: Loads of storage. Lightweight, small form factor Drive did all that I asked of it. I did not notice any excessive heat build up like you sometimes get from thumb drives when overtaxed.

CONS: Plastic casing makes you wonder how durable it is, not that I’ll be testing any of that. Initially fast transfer speed but slows down to a crawl when transferring large numbers of files all at the same time. Because of its small size it is easy to misplace and not find when you want it, and that is the reason for my title to this review “Keep in Box Easily Misplaced”

Yes I’d buy this again. It is a great price. I’ve never actually seen a portable drive that will do what I’ve wanted this one to do. Even internal drives get laggy when I transfer several hundred files at once. So Yes I’d buy again. Yes I’d recommend to a friend.

Yes I’d buy this again and recommend to a friend.
If you have any questions leave them below and I’ll do my best to answer or find you someone that can. Thank you.

This external is absolutely perfect for my needs. I bought the 2TB version and it has become my “everything” drive. I love having all of this space in such a portable form factor! It’s actually smaller than I expected it to be and it slips perfectly in my pocket and disappears because it’s so lightweight. Of course, don’t rely on a drive like this alone as your only backup. I have a 12TB NAS with redundancy that I use to back up this SSD (among other things) and my NAS is automatically backed up via Backblaze, so I have three locations (Backblaze being remote), and I have redundancy on my NAS so if one of those drives fails then I can replace it without losing anything.

Unfortunately I cannot harness the full speed of this drive because I’m using a 2014 MacBook Pro which only has USB-3, which is about half the speed of USB-C, furthermore I have this plugged into a powered USB hub. That being said, to my surprise I’m actually getting around 405 MB/s writes and 425 MB/s reads, which is significantly better than I thought I would get, this is a little over 4X faster than real world performance of a standard non-SSD external drive, so it’s still plenty zippy for my needs!

To test a sustained load I moved over my existing Kontakt library (music production plugins and such). A 160GB transfer took me 8 minutes and 23 seconds, which is perfectly fine, when moving using a standard non-SSD external it takes almost 35 minutes! A more reasonable 3GB transfer takes around 7-8 seconds, doing the same file transfer over to my WD EasyStore (standard HDD) takes about 38 seconds. For fun I tested transferring 3GB to my NAS and it took 1 minute 36 seconds. I expected it to be slow because I don’t have the best internal network plus I’m using slow (but reliable) drives and it has to write the data multiple times. The NAS is just for bulk storage.

The icing on top is the added durability. This is IP55 rated which means it can withstand dust and splashing, which means it’s great for outdoor use for storing photos and such. Furthermore, it’s rated to withstand a 2 meter (roughly 6.5 foot) drop.

This is a great little drive! My MBP only has a 500GB drive and all of my plugins and samples were eating up hundreds of gigs and I was becoming really tired of constantly having to go through everything and try to maintain space. I wasn’t even able to download all of my Kontakt content locally because I simply didn’t have enough room, so I had to pick and choose what plugins I wanted to have locally, trying to store everything on the NAS was error-prone because Kontakt didn’t like it for some reason but it was also way too slow. This drive is fast enough to where I can work on Logic Pro X projects directly on it without having to create scratch space locally, something I couldn’t do with a normal non-SSD external (way too cumbersome). Now instead of having only 10-20GB local storage I’m back up to around 320GB – much better! I can breathe!

Just remember – don’t rely on any external as your only backup! Try to back up your most important data in three locations, one being a remote location, if possible.

The first thing you notice is this drive is very small and lightweight. In the picture that’s an iPhone XS Max for scale. An old school external HDD is easily double the size, triple the weight, a quarter of the speed at best and much less reliable. And the price is excellent: at the time of writing I paid £79 for the 500GB model with 550MB/s speed.

However it also feels rugged as the description advertises. I could probably drop this and not damage the actual flash storage.

It comes formatted as exFAT which is what you want. It works on every major OS (Windows, Mac, Linux) and handles large files and external flash storage well. Other formats I’ve found only work properly on one OS and especially with FAT32 don’t accept large files. Don’t reformat it unless you have to but if you do have to I recommend formatting it again as exFAT unless you’re doing something very specific that needs a different format (e.g. backup software that takes “snapshots” of your OS and data usually require specialised formats).

I originally got this to backup my laptop but since the internal storage on my laptop is almost full I’ve ended up filling this drive with media instead and honestly might just buy another one for backups. And I would have no problem buying this exact drive again too.

The only downside is the short cable and awkward adapter. It’s easy to buy a third party one of course but the included cable is awkward to have plugged into a laptop as it just hangs off when you lift the laptop up. To be fair though it does stay plugged in just fine while hanging which is good because it could corrupt data otherwise. Oh and if you don’t have a spare USB-C port and need to use the adapter for USB-A (regular old USB) make sure you put the adapter on the right way around! Yes there is a right way with this. If you put it on upside down it’ll keep unplugging itself from the computer and you’ll get data corruption. When fitted the right way it’s solid. And again you can cheaply buy long high quality USB-C to USB-A and USB-C to USB-C cables right here on Amazon. I got a pack of three for under a tenner. Bargain.

Oh one more small complaint. It came with some encryption software on it. This seems to be closed source and I can’t see much info on how it works. I wouldn’t trust random closed source software with encrypting my data personally. It’s nice SanDisk is clearly taking encryption somewhat seriously at least but I recommend using some tried and trusted open source encryption software like VeraCrypt instead.

Overall highly recommend this drive. Light, durable, fast, probably going to be very reliable (it’s an SSD made by experts in memory), great build quality especially for this price, has USB-C which is good future proofing even if you don’t use it right now. Only warnings I’d give are buy a better cable for it and don’t use the included encryption software.

Pode e usar até como disco de boot dada a sua grande velocidade. Recomendo a todos….