The “storage almost full” warning has a talent for appearing halfway through filming a school play. Deleting old photos on the spot is one answer, and owning a fast external drive is the better one, especially in a year when flash storage has become markedly more expensive. Sandisk’s latest pocket model is discounted for Amazon’s Prime Big Deal Days event, where Prime members can get the new 1TB Sandisk Extreme portable SSD for $209 instead of $299, which is 30% off.
Pocket-Sized, Splash-Proof and Faster Than Before
This is the new generation of a drive line that has been around for years, and the main change is speed. Sandisk quotes transfers of up to 2,000MB/s, close to twice the previous model, and illustrates it with a thousand high-resolution photos moved in under a minute. Two caveats come from the company’s own footnotes. The figure applies to reading, with writing somewhat slower, and it depends on the port the drive is plugged into. Many laptops will not reach the maximum, though even at half of it a 50GB video project copies in the time it takes to make a coffee.
Physically, the drive is tiny: 3.35 inches long, 2 inches wide and 0.39 inches thick, for a weight of 1.6 ounces, about half that of a deck of cards. It is also built to be mistreated. The IP65 rating covers dust and jets of water, so rain on a camera bag or a spilled drink should not be fatal, provided the drive is dry before it is connected. Sandisk adds drop protection up to 3 meters, or roughly ten feet, which covers a fall from a desk, a tripod or a ladder.
Connection is by USB-C, with a cable in the box, and the drive works with computers, tablets and phones, on Mac and PC alike. That makes it useful for emptying a phone of 4K video at the end of a trip without waiting for a cloud upload on hotel Wi-Fi. Amazon also lists the PlayStation 5 among compatible devices. One terabyte is a comfortable size for this kind of use: several years of photos, or a working library of video projects that travels in a shirt pocket.
For sensitive files, password protection with 256-bit AES encryption is available through Sandisk’s software, which has to be downloaded and runs on Windows 10 or later and macOS 12 or later. I’d turn it on for anything that leaves the house, since a drive this small is easy to lose. The warranty is a limited five-year one, generous for a product meant to be thrown in a bag. My only reservation concerns the price of flash memory in general, which makes a terabyte dearer today than buyers were used to, with or without a promotion.