SanDisk Announces Two New Type C-based Portable SSDs

Today SanDisk announced two new external storage products from the new Extreme Portable SSD series. The Extreme 900 Portable SSD and Extreme 500 Portable SSD fit into the rugged, yet pocket-sized category. Aimed at photographers, videographers, creative professionals, as well as tech enthusiasts, the new products can move massive files at brisk speeds, up to 9x faster than mechanical disk-based portable storage. 

"As a recognized leader in developing solutions for professional photographers and videographers, we designed this game-changing family of offerings to provide our customers with even greater speeds and capacities to keep up with rapidly increasing demands for high-quality content," said Dinesh Bahal, vice president, product marketing, SanDisk. "Whether a professional or amateur, this level of portability, speed and capacity is exceptional, and we believe it will transform the way people create and produce high quality video content—ultimately saving them time and money."

Dubbed the world's highest-performing, next-generation portable SSD, the Extreme 900 Portable SSD is available in capacity sizes up to 1.92 TB. SanDisk claims the new rugged model also delivers up to 9x the performance of a typical external hard drive with up to 850 MB/s of sequential transfer speed. With that level of performance this product would be a welcome addition to 4K video professionals or anyone needing to move large files quickly.

The SanDisk Ultra 900 Portable also ships with new USB Type-C, as well as legacy Type-A cables for flexibility and compatibility with a large number of existing devices. 

Starting out at $399.99 (480 GB) and scaling well to $599.99 for the 960 GB model and $999.99 for the large 1.92 TB model, the Ultra 900 Portable isn't for the faint of heart. However, the performance and density are class leading in the portable storage category and will have an impact on professional user productivity.

The smaller Ultra 500 Portable is half the size of a modern smartphone yet still delivers up to four times the performance of a typical spinning disk portable hard drive. The pocket-sized unit scales to 480 GB and delivers up to 415 MB/s of sequential performance. 

"We are now shooting with as many as twelve 4K cameras at once, so on set I need the most reliable and cutting-edge technology available to access, share and transfer enormous files," said Sam Nicholson, CEO of Stargate Studios and member of the American Society of Cinematographers. "Every minute counts when we are on location, so with these new, extraordinarily fast, portable SSDs from SanDisk, I can spend less time waiting on file transfer, and more time on creativity."

The SanDisk Extreme 500 Portable starts at $99.99 (120 GB) with the 240 GB model priced at $149.99 and the large 480 GB model at $239.99. 

SanDisk is leveraging the economics of scale with the company's new 15 nm lithography process to enable large capacity devices in more product categories. Until now, very few external storage products shipped from the factory with NAND flash that increases durability and performance. Samsung has already shipped a a competing product, the Portable T1. Until recently, portable flash-based storage has come from DIY users by simply combining client SSDs with low cost, often unreliable drive enclosures. The DIY products are limited to SATA performance levels where the new SanDisk Ultra 900 Portable SSD is designed to take full advantage of new USB 3.1 performance that scales to 10 Gbps, nearly twice as fast as SATA 6 Gbps.

Chris Ramseyer is a Contributing Editor for Tom's Hardware, covering Storage. Follow him on Twitter and Facebook.

Follow Tom's Hardware on Twitter, Facebook and Google+.