When you’re speccing up a Mac on the Apple website, we almost always recommend upgrading from the base storage to something that will allow you to store more files, apps, photographs, videos, and the like — we will never, however, tell you to go for the really big storage options because Apple simply charges far too much.
If you want 8TB of storage on a supported Mac, like the Mac Studio or the Mac Pro, you’ll have to fork out $2,200 of your hard-earned dollars for the privilege of as much storage as you can muster. Now, however, you have a new option — and it comes courtesy of this puck-shaped SSD drive from seasoned storage manufacturer SanDisk.
All the storage for a fraction of the price
First things first, so that we can get it out of the way — the price. The SanDisk Desk Drive’s 8TB variant will cost $699, a whole $1,800 less than Apple’s internal upgrade. While you might not get the blistering speeds of an Apple internal drive, you’ll get more than enough rapid storage to justify saving over half the price, and you get the added bonus of being able to cart it around if you need to switch desks.
On performance, SanDisk tells us that the Desk Drive will have read speeds of up to 1,000MB/s, so you’re leaving some performance on the table over Apple’s SSD upgrades, which reportedly reach speeds of over 5,000MB/s. That’s plenty for 8K video, of which you’ll be able to store loads on your monstrous 8TB drive. It connects to your computer over USB-C, although it looks like there’s no support for Thunderbolt, unfortunately, for the really speedy storage.
There is a 4TB version as well, which will cost $379 if you want some even cheaper storage, and don’t need the full 8TB. We were curious to see just how good the value on these drives is, so we did some clever calculations (AKA we visited a dollar-to-GB calculator) to see just how much bang you get for your buck. The 8TB drive is about 8 cents per GB, while the 4TB is around 9 cents. The Apple option? 27 cents. We know where we’d rather put our money!
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