Quick Review: SanDisk Extreme Pro Portable SSD

Now this is just getting plain silly.

A 1TB capacity, portable hard disk that uses SSD technology, is less than the thickness of, oh I dunno, maybe half the depth of my Huawei P30 mobile and not much larger than a credit card. If you want exacts, it is 11cm x 5.5cm x 1cm approx.

No, none of THAT stuff is silly of course. Hard disk drives – although these days of course there is no actual “disk” – have evolved a long, long way since I dropped a 10MB one down a staircase at my old Tandy Computer Centre in Subiaco.

That’s right, in 1982, a 10MB – not gigabyte, MEGABYTE – with just over 8MB usable was massive and cost around $6 grand. A bit later, and not that much either, a 10MB HDD was the standard size in the IBM PC and its clones like the Olivetti M24 and cost about a grand.

And they were still fragile too.

I remember seeing my first 16MB USB stick. So rare and expensive it was, that the PR company, now long gone, that sent it to me wanted it back after a week!

And so over the years it went on; memory got cheaper and cheaper, drives got smaller and smaller and capacity got more and more.

But a 1TB USB based drive that is so fast, you can edit 4K video directly from it?

That’s right. The SanDisk Extreme Pro SSD (RRP around $430) has a claimed 1 gigabyte / second read speed.

I tried it. And you can.

It’s designed to dissipate heat from the forged aluminium body and the whole thing is covered in a rubber coating that is also apparently dust / water protected to IP55 standard.

(The first 5 means: Protected against quantity of dust that could interfere with the normal operation of the product but not fully dust tight. Complete protection against solid objects.

The second 5 means: Protection assured against water jets projected by a nozzle (6.3mm) from any angle.

Now you know).

It comes with a 5-year warranty too.

I reckon my mates that shoot motor sport on their dSLRs and mirrorless beasties as well as the video guys knocking out 4K footage in the field like there is no tomorrow, will go nuts over this. With the Bathurst 12 hour next weekend, I’d be getting down to wherever you buy your kit from and grab one guys.

Try here for starters.

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