Gaming PC

SanDisk Professional PRO-G40 Thunderbolt / USB Dual-Mode Portable SSD Review

Western Digital today announces a new flagship portable SSD under the SanDisk Professional brand. The PRO-G40 dual-mode PSSD meets all criteria for prosumers, content creators, and studios looking for a high-performance, rugged, bus-powered portable storage drive with wide compatibility. 1TB and 2TB versions are available. The PSSD delivers maximum performance (nearly 3 Gbps) when connected to a Thunderbolt 3 host, but can also function as a 1 Gbps class drive when connected to a USB 3.2 Gen 2 host port. Western Digital provided a 2 TB sample of the PRO-G40 to rigorously evaluate direct attached storage.

prologue

External bus-powered storage devices have improved in both storage capacity and speed over the past decade. Thanks to rapid advances in flash technology (including the emergence of 3D NAND and NVMe) and faster host interfaces (such as Thunderbolt 3 and USB 3.x), there are now palm-sized flash-based devices capable of delivering 3 Gbps and beyond storage devices. speed. These speeds can be achieved with his Thunderbolt 4, but mass market devices will have to rely on USB. Within the USB ecosystem, USB 3.2 Gen 2 (10 Gbps) is fast becoming the entry level for thumb drives and portable SSDs.

The early wave of Thunderbolt 3-based portable SSDs and enclosures offered great performance, but incompatibility with legacy USB ports limited market acceptance. Intel’s Titan Ridge controller offered interesting features when used in client devices such as peripherals and docks. Along with downstream PCIe lanes, it also included a USB 3.2 Gen 2 host interface. This has allowed the manufacturer to tweak his legacy JHL7440 Thunderbolt 3 SSD to offer a unique dual-mode design. The USB 3.2 Gen 2 downstream port connects to the upstream interface of the USB to NVMe bridge chip. Depending on the host to which the drive is connected (reported by JHL7440), the NVMe SSD’s PCIe 3.0 x4 lane is connected to either the JHL7440’s downstream PCIe 3.0 x4 lane or the bridge chip’s PCIe 3.0 x4 lane . The Sabrent ROCKET XTRM-Q is one of the first PSSD lineups to support dual-mode operation based on this architecture.

Western Digital joins the dual-mode bandwagon today with the SanDisk Professional PRO-G40 Portable SSD. PSSD uses WD_BLACK SN750E M.2 2280 drives internally. On the bridge side, the JHL7440 Titan Ridge Thunderbolt 3 controller is powered by an ASMedia ASM2362 USB 3.2 Gen 2 to NVMe bridge chip. The enclosure itself is very stylish and made from solid aluminum. One side is covered with a silicone base. The drive also includes an LED indicator and a metal-enhanced USB-C port.

These features allow the PRO-G40 to get an IP68 rating – complete protection against dust ingress and no damage from a full and continuous impression in 1m of water. A rugged aluminum core allows for drop (up to 3m) and impact resistance (up to 4000 lbs) to support faster heat dissipation as part of your thermal solution.

The PRO-G40 PSSD comes in a minimal package with a body and a short 20cm Thunderbolt 3 passive cable. Length can be an issue for a typical desktop, but use cases for these dual-mode drives include notebooks or systems that use his Thunderbolt dock as part of their workspace.

The drive comes formatted for Mac out of the box, but is easy to reformat in your OS of choice. The samples were evaluated on exFAT filesystems on Windows 10 machines. The “problem” that plagues all Thunderbolt SSDs on Windows also affects the SanDisk Professional PRO-G40. Write performance will not match expectations/advertised numbers unless write caching is enabled in the volume policy of the drive attached to the Thunderbolt port.

Our policy is to evaluate all external storage devices with default OS settings. This is for quick removal since moving to Windows 10 on a new testbed. However, we evaluated the PRO-G40 drive three times. Once to a Thunderbolt 3 port and once to a USB 3.2 Gen 2×2 port enabled by an ASMedia ASM2342 controller. In the final pass, we repeated the evaluation procedure with different write cache settings (default settings on the left, modified on the right), as shown in the image below.

CrystalDiskInfo provides an overview of PSSD as seen from the host system. The interfaces section is of particular interest – NVM Express over Thunderbolt, and UASP (NVM Express) over USB 3.2 Gen 2×2 Type-C.

SMART passthrough – CrystalDiskInfo

The table below provides a comparative view of the specifications of the various PSSDs presented in this review.

Comparing direct-attached storage device configurations
side
downstream port PCIe3.0×4 PCIe3.0×4
upstream port Thunderbolt 3 and USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-C Thunderbolt 3 and USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-C
bridge chip Intel JHL7440 + ASMedia ASM2362 Intel JHL7440 + ASMedia ASM2362
Power bus power bus power
Use case Dual-mode Thunderbolt / USB High-performance, rugged portable SSD with a focus on durability (IP68 rated) Dual-mode Thunderbolt / USB High-performance, rugged portable SSD with a focus on durability (IP68 rated)
External dimensions 109.5mm x 57mm x 12mm 109.5mm x 57mm x 12mm
weight 122.3 grams 122.3 grams
cable 20cm Thunderbolt 3 40Gbps Type-C to Type-C 20cm Thunderbolt 3 40Gbps Type-C to Type-C
SMART passthrough yes yes
UASP support yes yes
TRIM passthrough yes yes
hardware encryption No No
Rated storage WD_BLACK SN750E (SanDisk ??L BiCS? 3D TLC) WD_BLACK SN750E (SanDisk ??L BiCS? 3D TLC)
price US$450 US$450
review link SanDisk Professional PRO-G40 SSD 2TB Review SanDisk Professional PRO-G40 SSD 2TB Review

Before looking at the benchmark numbers, power consumption, and effectiveness of the thermal solution, we will discuss the testbed setup and evaluation methodology.

Testbed setup and evaluation method

Direct-attached storage devices are evaluated using a Quartz Canyon NUC (essentially a Xeon/ECC version of a Ghost Canyon NUC) configured with: 2x 16GB DDR4-2667 ECC SODIMMs and PCIe 3.0 x4 NVMe SSD – IM2P33E8 1TB From ADATA.

The most attractive aspect of the Quartz Canyon NUC is that it has two PCIe slots (electrically x16 and x4) for add-in cards. If you don’t have a discrete GPU (not required for the DAS testbed), both slots are available. In fact, we added a spare SanDisk Extreme PRO M.2 NVMe SSD to the baseboard’s CPU-direct M.2 22110 slot to avoid the DMI bottleneck when evaluating Thunderbolt 3 devices. This allows for two add-in cards that run at x8 (x16 electrical) and x4 (x4 electrical). Quartz Canyon NUC does not have a native USB 3.2 Gen 2×2 port, so Silverstone’s SST-ECU06 Install an add-in card in the x4 slot. All non-Thunderbolt devices are tested with the Type-C port enabled by SST-ECU06.

The specifications of the testbed are summarized in the table below.

AnandTech DAS Testbed Configuration for 2021
system Intel Quartz Canyon NUC9vXQNX
CPU Intel Xeon E-2286M
memory ADATA Industrial AD4B3200716G22
32GB (2x 16GB)
DDR4-3200 ECC @ 22-22-22-52
OS drive ADATA Industrial IM2P33E8 NVMe 1TB
Secondary drive SanDisk Extreme Pro M.2 NVMe 3D SSD 1TB
add-on card SilverStone Tek SST-ECU06 USB 3.2 Gen 2×2 Type-C Host
OS Windows 10 Enterprise x64 (21H1)
Thanks to ADATA, Intel and SilverStone Tek for the build components.

Testbed hardware is just one segment of the evaluation. Over the last few years, the typical direct-attached storage workload on memory cards has also evolved. High bitrate 4K video at 60fps is becoming commonplace, and 8K video is starting to emerge. Thanks to high-res textures and artwork, game install sizes are steadily increasing even on handhelds. With these in mind, the evaluation scheme for direct-attached storage devices includes multiple workloads detailed in corresponding sections.

  • Synthetic workload using CrystalDiskMark and ATTO
  • Real-world access traces using PCMark 10 storage benchmarks
  • Custom robocopy workload reflecting typical DAS usage
  • Sequential write stress test

The following section outlines the performance of the SanDisk Professional PRO-G40 2TB PSSD on these benchmarks. Before we draw any conclusions, we also consider the power consumption numbers and thermal solutions of the device.

Related Articles

Back to top button