The problem with external drives is that as much as a manufacturer can claim that a drive reaches mind boggling speeds the chances that the user will see those speeds isn’t guaranteed.

Try as they might, manufacturers can’t account for your specific setup. The speed of an external drive can be influenced by your operating system, your hardware and even the connections within your PC or notebook.

When we saw claims that the SanDisk Extreme PRO portable SSD V2 1TB could reach read and write speeds of 2 000MB per second, we were curious because being able to transfer 2GB of data in a second is an incredible feat. The external drive makes use of an NVMe SSD.

Unfortunately, in our testing we never quite saw the speeds that SanDisk claimed we would.

First, lets discuss the good.

The SanDisk ships with both a USB Type-C to Type-C connector as well as USB Type-C to Type-A connector if you don’t have a Type-C port on your PC or notebook.

The drive is covered in a rubberised coating that makes it water and dust resistant. SanDisk claims that the drive can withstand water flowing at 30kPa for three minutes and “limited dust contact”. The drive carries an IP55 rating.

Now, on to the bad.

We tested the SanDisk Extreme PRO portable SSD on the following PC:

• AMD Ryzen 5 3600,
• 16GB DDR4 RAM @ 3200,
• ASUS TUF B450 GAMING PLUS motherboard,
• Windows 11 Pro version 10.0.22622 Build 2622.

With this configuration we tested the drive via USB Type-C to USB Type-C as well as USB Type-C to USB Type-A.

As per SanDisk’s warning “performance may be lower depending on host device, interface, usage conditions and other factors” can affect the speeds.

So with our setup we saw the following numbers using CrystalDiskMark 8.

Any way we slice this, it’s not good. With claimed speed of 2 000MB/s for both read and write, the fact that, at best, we can almost hit 50 percent of that claimed speed doesn’t look good. Worse, our Type-C to Type-C test only hit 445MB/s read speeds which doesn’t bode well at all.

Testing the drive on an Acer Predator Triton 300 notebook, our speeds were even worse with a read/write speed of 458MB/s and 453MB/s respectively. To add even more confusion when we tested the SanDisk using the Type-C port we achieved read/write speeds of 905MB/s and 871MB/s respectively.

Claimed speeds then, are pure marketing because one needs to use the drive in the exact conditions SanDisk did in order to reach the claimed speeds. It’s just not tenable for the average user who is definitely going to feel burned when they see their speeds aren’t close to what the package claims.

Is the drive fast? Absolutely but the price of it immediately got our backs up.

At R5 060 through ORMS Direct, this is just not a product we can recommend. The SanDisk Extreme PRO portable SSD is also a let-down when it comes to performance.

There are more affordable SSDs out there but note that they may suffer under the same claimed versus actual speed we’ve seen here. Our advice is find something that doesn’t put as big a dent in your budget as this drive does.