There's no more satisfying a thunk than plopping one of these on your desk.
SanDisk Desk Drive | 4 TB | USB 3.2 Gen 2×1 | 1,000 MB/s | $379.99 $268.99 at Amazon (save $111)
This external SSD is only ‘portable’ in the sense that a laptop is ‘portable’—you’re not going to be putting one in your pocket. But what you get is something incredibly capacious, reliable, and consistent, which is great for backups, important data, or giant libraries. For this heavily discounted price it’s a solid choice.View Deal
The SanDisk Desk Drive isn’t your usual external SSD. In lieu of the average drive’s dinky chassis, this one is a bit of a paperweight-sized chonker. What justifies this heft, however, is its consistency and reliability, which I was pleasantly surprised with during testing for my review of the 8 TB version. So with this 4 TB version now being on sale for just $269 at Amazon, I will recommend it without hesitation.
It’s called a Desk Drive presumably because you’re supposed to keep it on your desk as a semi-permanent backup or storage solution. Yet it still retains its portability benefit in a pinch, provided you’re willing to chuck all 268 g of it and its external power supply into your backpack.
That power supply, by the way, is one of the biggest benefits to a drive such as this. Having external, active power means you’re less at risk of failed transfers or data corruption due to janky power-over-USB. If you have a software, firmware, or straight-up system power delivery issue, these will be less likely to affect the drive as it’s not being powered via the same USB connection it’s using for data transfer.
The downside to this, of course, is that you have to have a spare socket going to plug the thing in. But if you want this level of reliability, that’s a sacrifice you should be willing to make.
One primary use case for the SanDisk Desk drive might be as a portable media library for content creators—gaming YouTubers, for instance. If you need to store lots of large, important video files, you’re going to want storage that has a lot of capacity (4 TB, check), is reliable (active power, check), and is consistent (steady transfer speeds, check).
I found the SanDisk Desk Drive to outperform any other drives that I’d tested, including some of the best external SSDs on the market, in terms of consistent speeds. It never shifted from its 930–935 MB/s steady rate of transfer throughout any of my IOMeter tests.
And sure, that might be because its cache is very big given the drive is very big, but either way you’re getting tons of data transferred consistently over very long stretches—more than 800 GB of data over 15 minutes. Whether that’s for full-system backups (with the help of Acronis True Image, software that it comes with), video libraries, or even extra-large game libraries, it’ll work a charm.
And yes, it does work well as a drive to run your games from. I found it to have faster random 4k read speeds (40.1 MB/s) than other premium drives such as the Samsung T9, and this is what gaming will use the most. It also achieved a higher 3DMark Storage score than other drives, and this benchmark tests real-world gaming scenarios.
Much depends on how much storage you actually need, though, plus how portable you need the drive to be. If you have a giant game or media library you want to be able to take around with you on occasion, then I reckon this drive is ideal. But if you want something to carry around with you 24/7, you might want a smaller drive. And if you’re just looking to store a few games or a few files, you’ll probably want to go for an SSD with less capacity and save some money.
But for those of you looking for a reliable, consistent, capacious, and—I must admit—satisfyingly chunky external drive to store heaps of important data, for this discount the SanDisk Desk Drive is well worth your consideration.
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