Sharge Disk Pro 2TB review: Great sustained writes, active cooling, and a built-in hub

Sharge's Disk Pro portable SSD is proof that there's room for innovation, even in a product category as established as 10 Gbps (USB 3.2 Gen 2) external SSDs. With its built-in USB / HDMI hub, as well as a fan for extra cooling, plus the company's signature eye-catching translucent shell, it's far more interesting (and more genuinely useful for those on the go) than most ho-hum drives in this well-established speed class.

Plus, as we'll see in testing, while it's not the speediest of 10 Gbps drives in all tests, it excels where it counts, for the professional users who may be drawn in by the "Pro" in the drive's name. It's one of the best-performing drives in its class when it comes to sustained writes. And with so many laptops, phones, and tablets making do with just USB-C, it's a great drive to keep in your travel bag.

Its primary downside is price, with the 2TB model selling for around $365 when I tested it, and since climbing to around $385. That's a lot to ask for a drive of this capacity and class, but in case you haven't noticed, the cost of storage these days is following RAM into the stratosphere, thanks to demand from AI hyperscalers.

Specs

Design and accessories

The Sharge Disk Pro comes with a simple carrying sleeve and a couple of sticky-backed magnetic rings you can stick onto a gaming console or laptop lid so you can conveniently connect and carry the drive – but the primary accessories are baked in.

The cable is attached and clips into the USB-C port of the hub when not in use, covering the HDMI 2.1, USB 3.0, and USB 2.0 ports. The cable is short, at a little over three inches, and it's permanently attached, so it could certainly fail over time. But I didn't have much of an issue with the length during my testing.

The side of the drive has a button to force the built-in fan on, for what the company calls Turbo Mode, designed to keep the drive at 50 degrees C for the heaviest of workloads. But the fan turns on by itself regardless when needed, and is rated to adjust between 7,000 and 10,000 RPM.

I tested the drive in automatic mode, because it runs close to the top end of its interface bottleneck by default. And I probably wouldn't use the turbo mode unless I was doing something like filling the entire drive. Although the fan doesn't have a particularly annoying pitch, it's a roughly 40 mm, high-RPM fan, so it's definitely noticeable when it's on.

There's also a switch next to the fan button, which Sharge says is for data production and drive preservation. But it's also useful not to have to power up the drive when you just want to use the baked-in hub.

As you can see in the photos, the front is also transparent, with the controller and other components visible.

And the back is metal, with a built-in magnet for snapping onto a modern smartphone – or you could stick one of the two included metal rings to a gaming handheld or a laptop lid and use the device that way. Just be careful where you put the ring, because the cable is, again, quite short.

It's also worth pointing out that despite having four extra ports and a fan, the Disk Pro is still impressively small, at 90 x 61 x 11 mm. Its size, combined with the transparent top, reminded me so much of an old-school cassette that I had to dig one out for comparison.

The only thing I really don't like about the Disk Pro's design is that, because the USB connector docks in the hub's USB-C port when not in use, that port is surrounded by plastic, so many USB-C cables won't fit. Specifically, the first three fast USB4 and 20 Gbps USB cables I dug up didn't fit, before I found one with a port end that was thin enough to plug into the hub.

So I'd recommend finding a cable that fits and keeping it with the drive if you're often using the hub along with the internal SSD. And you'll probably want to find a compatible cable, because the USB-C port in the Disk Pro supports up to 100W input and 85W output, so you can keep your laptop, phone, or handheld charged while you use the drive and the hub.

The SSD itself, which Sharge says uses WD's BiCS6 NAND, ships empty, and there is no mention of software that I could find on the product page. So whatever software you want to use with the drive, you'll have to find it for yourself.

Comparison products

Outside of a few drive enclosures with built-in USB hubs, the Disc Pro doesn't have a lot in the way of direct competition if you are looking for a portable SSD with a handful of handy ports. However, if you're happy to carry around a separate hub and drive, there are lots of similarly speedy portable SSD options.

Most of the external SSD competition has also risen in price pretty drastically in the last several months. Crucial's X9 Pro (which we tested alongside the X10 Pro in 2023) is one of the better-performing 10 Gbps drives, but the 2TB model seems to have been discontinued – the 1TB model currently sells for around $173 and the 4TB model is $318 at Amazon. Any way you slice it, the Disk Pro is pricey, at $379 for the 2TB version we tested, and a whopping $669 for the 4TB model.

The 2TB X10 Pro is just $236 and has twice the bandwidth of the Disk Pro, but you'd need to have a 20 Gbps port to take advantage of that extra speed. Most other name-brand external SSDs are priced higher than Crucial's drives these days, though. Perhaps because the brand has been killed off by parent company Micron to focus on the AI market, so it doesn't care much to capitalize on existing stock. SanDisk's 10 Gbps 2TB Extreme Portable SSD is currently $299.

Storage Testbed

In 2025, we updated our external storage testbed to an AMD Ryzen 7600X-based PC with an Asus ROG Crosshair X870E Hero motherboard, installed in Lian Li’s Lancool 217 case. This was done in part because we needed a system with native USB4 support for upcoming drives (like this one).

All the drives in the charts below have been re-tested on the new X870E system, with the exception of the final Iometer sustained sequential test. That benchmark is less about top speed and more about how long a drive can write before depleting any fast cache onboard. We also updated to CrystalDiskMark 8, rather than the older (and non-comparable) version 7 we used on the previous testbed.

Trace Testing - PCMark 10 Storage Benchmark

PCMark 10 is a trace-based benchmark that uses a wide-ranging set of real-world traces from popular applications and everyday tasks to measure the performance of storage devices.

Sharge's Disk Pro looks pretty good on this first test, landing behind the 40 Gbps Corsair drive and Crucial's 20 Gbps X10. The only 10 Gbps drive that beat the Sharge here was Orico's BookDrive, which we recently tested. Its score of 1171 put it ahead of all the other 10 Gbps drives tested here.

Transfer Rates – DiskBench

In this real-world file transfer test, the Disk Pro landed behind 10 Gbps drives like Crucial's X9 Pro and the PX10 from Silicon Power on reads, but ahead of most of the competition in its class. Its read speeds were better than the Samsung T9, although Sammy's drive was faster on writes.

Synthetic Testing CrystalDiskMark

CrystalDiskMark (CDM) is a free and easy-to-run storage benchmarking tool that SSD companies commonly use to assign product performance specifications. It gives us insight into how each device handles different file sizes. We run this test at its default settings.

Moving back to synthetic tests, the Sharge drive looked good in our sequential testing, only beaten (again) by the X9 Pro and faster 20-40 Gbps drives from Crucial and Corsair on the read side. Writes were a little slower, but still above the 1000 MB/s threshold.

In small file performance, the Disk Pro performed its worst on our charts, although its writes were still right around the middle of this test pack.

Sustained Write Performance

A drive's rated write specifications are only a piece of the performance picture. Most external SSDs (just like their internal counterparts) implement a write cache, or a fast area of flash, programmed to perform like faster SLC, that absorbs incoming data.

Sustained write speeds often suffer tremendously when the workload saturates the cache and slips into the "native" TLC or QLC flash. We use Iometer to hammer the SSD with sequential writes for 15 minutes to measure the size of the write cache and performance after the cache is saturated.

Perhaps aided by its built-in fan, which kicks on automatically when needed, the Sharge Disk Pro started off not far from the drive's max bandwidth, in the 930 MB/s range, and only dipped slightly after about 90 seconds, staying easily above 900 MB/s for the rest of our 15-minute charted results. In fact, we let the test run for a full half hour, and the drive maintained that speed throughout.

Contrast that with the Orico drive, which looked fine in a few of the other benchmarks, but did abysmally here, dropping to less than a fifth of the Disk Pro's speed after roughly two minutes. The Sharge Disk Pro earns its "Pro" badge, and then some, on this test. Among drives of its class, only the Crucial X9 Pro did better here, and not by much.

Bottom Line

On the one hand, the Sharge Disk Pro is easily the most interesting, innovative, and genuinely useful 10 Gbps drives I've tested, possibly ever. Its built-in hub makes it great for travel or on-the-go work, and its performance is close enough to the best in its class that you wouldn't notice the difference outside of benchmarks. Then there's the magnetic back, which can make use and travel with mobile devices more convenient – though I don’t think I'd personally stick a metal ring on the back of my laptop for use with this drive. Out of all the drives I've tested in the past several years, if I didn't need anything faster than 10 Gbps, this is the drive I would reach for when on the go, because my laptop doesn't have enough ports.

All that said, it's hard to ignore the drive's price. To be fair, the cost of most storage has been ramping up for months, thanks to AI-driven demand. And most recently released competing drives are at least similarly pricey. But some older drives have remained more reasonably priced – for however long stock of those drives lasts.

Crucial's X9 in particular is stiff competition at the moment. While the 2TB model seems to be out of stock, the 1TB X9 is is $173, while the 4TB model is $318. The Disk Pro is currently nearly $100 more expensive ($269) for the 1TB model, and more than double the Crucial drive at the 4TB capacity ($669). Of course, the X9 Pro doesn't come with a built-in hub or a magnetic back, but it is about half the size of Sharge's drive, and a comparable compact hub costs around $20-$30. So you're definitely paying a price premium for the Disk Pro's feature-packed versatility.