SanDisk Extreme Pro

If a small size and toughness are at the top of your wishlist, it’s time to go to the Extreme

SCORE

PRICE 1TB, £98 (£118 inc VAT) from pcpro.link/324san1

READ SPEED 957MB/ SEC

WRITE SPEED 957MB/ SEC

The SanDisk Extreme looks a lot like the Extreme Pro ( see p84), but the two aren’t identical. This one’s considerably smaller, measuring 50 x 96mm, and the orange trim is confined to the corner, rather than running all the way round the outer edge. At 63g, it’s lighter too; in all it’s a much more low-key drive.

Nevertheless, the Extreme matches the build quality of its bigger brother, with the same tough plastic and rubber construction, and again an IP55 rating promising resistance to dust and splashes. On the downside, hardware encryption remains absent, and the warranty on this model is shorter than the Pro at three years instead of five.

The biggest difference is that, in place of the Extreme Pro’s 20Gbits/sec socket, this non-Pro edition makes do with a regular USB 3.2 Gen 2 connector. SanDisk weirdly undersells this, advertising read speeds of up to 550MB/sec – in fact, as expected, we saw sequential read and write speeds top out at a little under 1GB/sec, which isn’t bad at all for outboard storage. Random-access performance is respectable too: the PCMark 10 benchmark gave the SanDisk Extreme a data disk score of 1,544, which is impressively close to the 1,788 we saw from the Extreme Pro.

Price-wise, both the 1TB and 2TB models work out to 13p/GB, which is good value for this type of drive. If you like the idea of a compact and rugged portable

SSD, and don’t need next-generation performance, the SanDisk Extreme is a very persuasive proposition.