SanDisk Professional 6TB G-Drive Enterprise-Class External Desktop Hard Drive - 7200RPM Ultrastar HDD Inside, USB-C (10Gbps), USB 3.2 Gen 2, Mac Ready - SDPHF1A-006T-NBAAD

I've been using two of these for more than a month, and so far I haven't had any problems at all. I'm using them for backups, so they don't get stressed very much, but they stay cool and quiet, unlike some other drives I've had. The enclosure seems rugged, and even looks a bit stylish. The performance is more than adequate for what I'm doing -- not as good as a SSD, of course, but better than an ordinary "USB-powered" drives.Note that this drive is much less "portable" than some of its peers: it has an external power supply (so you need to carry that with you, *and* have a place to plug it in, if you want to use it away from your office), and the enclosure is larger and heavier than those drives, and, although the enclosure seems very robust, it might not be as drop-resistant because it isn't padded like some of them are. This is fine with me, because my plan is to leave this on my desk and use it for backups when my computer is docked.

I was very happy with this drive for 5 months--right up until yesterday when it failed. I have the 6TB version formatted APFS and I've been using it as a Time Machine backup drive on my Mac. While performing an hourly backup yesterday MacOS reported that the drive had ejected. I ran First Aid on the drive and it reported bad sectors and that the drive was not repairable. At the time it failed it was only 60% full.I alternate between 3 drives for backups just for occasions like this so I simply erased the drive and tried again. Same problem. Then I repartioned, erased, and tried. Same result. So I started the long process of trying multiple file system formats including APFS, Mac OS Journaled, and even ExFAT. I also tried partitioning into multiple volumes and testing each volume separately. Everything I tried had the same result. When I attempted to write to the drive it would begin and after less than a minute the drive would eject itself.The message was the same one you see if you unplug a drive without unmounting first--a simple warning that the drive was ejected without being unmounted. Looking at the drive in Disk Utility I can see that despite the warning message the failed drive was not actually unmounted nor was it ejected. I just can't write to it.Since experiencing this issue I've read a number of similar reports with this specific model. I have been a big fan of Sandisk until now. I have over dozen Sandisk SD cards and several Sandisk SSD drives which have all performed well for years. This model (a mechanical drive) is the first Sandisk drive that I've had trouble with.But unfortunately, and unlike much cheaper Seagate and Western Digital backup drives I've used in the past, this drive is now completely useless. Even after a failure my cheap WD and Seagate drives can simply be reformatted and used for non-critical storage tasks but this 6TB Sandisk G-Drive is now completely unusable since it will no longer stay mounted. Regardless of how it's formatted the drive unmounts and ejects itself as soon as a write is attempted.Very disappointing.

Nice capacity drive at a great price. Seems to be faster than the now really old G-RAID Studio Lightning that it is replacing. I needed a new drive quick (old drive case was failing) and this was a great choice for me. I received it in one day at a great price. Using it for storage and working with terabytes of photos, videos and graphic files connected to my Mac. I have not run any speed tests, but it seems plenty quick to me. It has also been reliable for me, since I bought this some time ago and am now writing a review. I would not use this drive for app caching, since 2-4 TB solid state drives are fairly inexpensive now and would work a lot better for that purpose. The only issue I ran across (which has been mentioned in other reviews) is the aggressive drive sleeping. It was annoying (since it was sleeping after only a few minutes of inactivity). But, changing the system settings for the drive have helped. As well as taking it off of a brand new USB 4.0 hub and plugging it directly into my Mac. There is no G-Tech software for this drive. It is only plug and play. So far I have no complaints. It has been fast and reliable. Hopefully it will last as long as the last G-Tech drive it replaces. If you need a large drive for a great price, this one is great.