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REPORT SUMMARY AND FINAL THOUGHTS
If you are a digital media professional as I, you can truly appreciate what SanDisk has accomplished with the PRO-BLADE ecosystem. This will be finding immediate use on conclusion of this report and the beauty of this is the fact that I can simply add PRO-Blade SSD Mags as I need them, or I wonder… Can I throw in an 8TB SSD or two into one of the PRO-BLADE SSD Mag shells? In any case, the ability to hot swap the mags is a huge step forward and I am already imagining re-organizing my media storage as I write this.
The odd duck in this equation still stands as the PRO-BLADE Transport being USB 3.2 Gen 2×2 20Gbps while the PRO-BLADE Station will be Thunderbolt 3… and not Thunderbolt 4? This was done to achieve top performance between the Station and your main system. Maybe this is a sign of things to come. Up until the newest Z790 Raptor Lake motherboards, we have never seen both Thunderbolt 3/4 ports as well as USB 3.2 Gen 2×2 together on a single motherboard. We see this in the newest Asus Rog Z790 Maximus Hero and that would be a perfect fit for this ecosystem. We can’t blame SanDisk completely though as the industry has really done a flip-flop with respect to Thunderbolt and/or USB 3.2 Gen 2×2. Which will it be at days end?
All-in all, SanDisk has created a new concept which we believe will catch on quickly, the reason being that each PRO-BLADE SSD Mag is so small, capable of very high capacity, and is hot swappable from the Transport of main Station. It is capable of pleasing the USB 3.2 2×2 crowds as it is the Thunderbolt crowd and this could really be just a start. Might we see direct connection of the SSD Mag to media gear via an adapter in the future. Who knows. Kudos to SanDisk for such manufacture as it just may be one of the most useful storage products we have found in some time! Quite possibly, the only thing left out here are the stickers to label each SSD Mag. Editors Choice.
CHECK SANDISK PRO-BLADE PRICING AT AMAZON
I have a feeling that in the future you will dissect a 1TB Mag and insert an 8TB SSD to see if it works, and I’ll be interested in finding out whether it does or not.
However I see no reason why it wouldn’t. If it does, then the option of purchasing bare Mags would be very nice!
The PRO-BLADE SSD Mags are constructed of an anodized grey aluminum two-piece shell which is secured by three Torx screws.
What brought me to this site is that I just purchased the transport and a couple of mags only to find that the USB a ports on my 3-year-old computer won’t handle the data transfer. Foo!!! do you have a recommendation for a card reader with USB c 3.2 ports that would work for me? Thanks.
No. Sorry and understand your frustration completely. Just building our new Hero maximus Z790 Bench in order to take full advantage of these. Stay tuned!