Guide

SanDisk Extreme Portable: Our favourite friend when travelling

26.11.2018

Translation: machine translated

Hard drive storage is unsexy. Unless, of course, you have to take factors such as time, mass and robustness into account when choosing your USB storage device. Then you're quickly looking at really expensive drives, unless of course you're looking at the Sandisk Extreme Portable.

There are some things that you only have an opinion on when it really matters. Hard drives, for example. It's even rarer when you don't have to justify yourself forever and start a long speech with the words "Oh, I have an opinion on external hard drives".

This is the case for video producer Stephanie Tresch and me when we talk about "The Sandisk". All our memory cards for cameras are also from the American manufacturer, but the title "The Sandisk", with a large specific article in front of it, goes to a small external hard drive: the Sandisk Extreme Portable with 1000 GB of storage space.

External SSD

SANDISK Extreme Portable V1

1 TB

Thus: A song of praise for a small black block with a red highlight. Because there are few objects in our everyday working life that impress us so much. The small plate has never let us down, has never been too small and has now probably given us hours of sleep time at trade fairs.

We want raw speed

When Stephanie and I report from a trade fair, we don't have the luxury of the Zurich infrastructure. We also can't rely on the Synology NAS, which serves as an archive and resource storage. We rely on offline data and prepare in such a way that we can do the same work redundantly on several machines. Sometimes I render a video on my HP Spectre - even if the machine isn't designed for it - while Stephanie is already editing the next video on her Dell XPS 15 and needs computing power for it. To do this, we have to move data from her laptop to mine.

Of course, we could use any external hard drive, but if we're working into the night, we want to go to sleep at some point. The more we sleep, the easier the day after. That's why we need speed. The Sandisk Extreme promises a lot. Above all, the read rate of up to 550 MB/s plays into our hands. At no point does it feel like we're working from an external hard drive.

pleasantly quickly.
For comparison: We usually notice a slowdown when working from an external hard drive. LaCie discs have done a good job so far, but they can't hold a candle to "The Sandisk". When we work with slower and, admittedly, cheaper discs or USB sticks, we first copy the data to a local drive before working with it. That takes time. A lot of time, because a video project for a three-minute trade fair film usually takes up between 1.5 and 5 GB of space as raw data. Let's say 3.25 GB on average. Let's do the maths with the best possible theoretical speeds:

USB 2.0: 60 MB/s
USB 3.0: 625 MB/s
USB-C / USB 3.1: 2500 MB/s

In practice, you rarely achieve these speeds, as a number of arbitrary factors play a role in the transfer speeds. Among other things, the cable length and - if you ask me as an annoying user - how much of a hurry I'm in. Nevertheless, the differences in speed are also remarkable in practice and if you don't want to waste time anyway, then you realise that you're aiming for USB-C. Because even if the theoretical speeds are not reached, you will notice the difference at work. Again using theoretical speeds, it takes 3.25 GB, or 3250 MB, of raw video to transfer:

USB 2.0: 54.16 seconds
USB 3.0: 5.20 seconds
USB-C: 1.3 seconds

In reality, this all takes a few seconds longer, but the difference is noticeable.

Sandisk is a little more realistic with its speed specifications, speaking of 550 MB/s as the read rate. If we reach this speed, then the data transfer takes 5.9 seconds. You can work with that, can't you?

Why your storage should be rugged

The Sandisk Extreme Portable is built tough. That's a good thing, because when you're at a trade fair or travelling a lot, you quickly realise that you don't actually want a nice, beautiful technology device. You want metal, unibodies, waterproof and dustproof. Because when Stephanie and I are travelling to a trade fair, we don't want to have to worry about things like rain or bumps in crowds. This is less of a problem with larger items such as cameras or laptops, as they rarely fall down. But an external hard drive that you quickly throw across the living room to another person in an AirBnB should be able to withstand something.

The problem: Rugged hard drives are usually quite bulky. Take a look at the LaCie Ruggeds. They're immune to pretty much everything and the cockroaches that will take over our world after the nuclear apocalypse will read holiday pictures from these hard drives, but they're clunky.

External hard drives

EUR158,63 EUR39,66/1TB

LaCie Rugged Mini

4 TB

mantona Urban Companion (Photo backpack, 22 l)

Camera bag

−8%

EUR34,– was EUR36,79

mantona Urban Companion

Photo backpack, 22 l

If you have space, then that's absolutely no problem. But if you have to fit a fully functional editorial team in a Fjallraven Kånken - now replaced by a Mantona Urban Companion - and a converted army backpack, then space is something you don't usually really have.

The Sandisk is a great choice.

The Sandisk finds the compromise between stable and compact. Because the 1000 GB memory is barely bigger than a credit card and weighs 93 grams, without cable. Sure, with IP55 standard, the Sandisk doesn't survive quite as much as the LaCie Ruggeds, but that's easily enough for a trade fair, as we don't usually expect big dust storms and/or monsoon rain in exhibition halls. However, the cockroach rulers will probably come away empty-handed.

The Sandisk can withstand up to 1500 grams of force. That means you can drop it from time to time. I haven't calculated exactly from what height, as there's a good reason why I write professionally and don't do the maths, but if you want to work it out, let me know your result and your solution in the comments. You'll then win a no prize. It's like a normal prize, but simply that you get nothing.

Why today?

A small paragraph on my own behalf: I rarely do frontal advertising, because I find advertising along the lines of "Buy this now!" repulsive and patronising. So why the adulation of a small hard drive? Because today, Monday 26 November 2018, is Cyber Monday. And as luck would have it, the Sandisk Extreme Portable is on sale. It costs a good hundred less than usual, because high-speed storage comes at a high price. When the Sandisk came onto the market, Stephanie and I looked at the USB memory, but then quickly rejected the idea of buying one.

Today, however, the little thing is on sale on Cyber Monday. And it's worth it. Admittedly, it's also worth it when it's not Cyber Monday or Black Friday.

So, that's it. And if you don't believe me that I bought the disc...

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Dominik Bärlocher

Senior Editor

dominik.baerlocher@digitecgalaxus.ch

Journalist. Author. Hacker. A storyteller searching for boundaries, secrets and taboos – putting the world to paper. Not because I can but because I can’t not.

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