WD has relaunched the G-DRIVE brand as the single identity for its external storage products aimed at professional content creators, replacing the SanDisk Professional name across the range.
The change brings desktop drives, portable drives and multi-bay RAID systems under one label. The products are designed for workflows in high-resolution photography, video production, graphic design and audio.
Products currently branded as SanDisk Professional are expected to transition to G-DRIVE by the end of the month. New units carrying G-DRIVE branding have already started shipping.
The move follows Western Digital’s separation into a standalone hard disk drive company in early 2025. The business continues to sell HDD products under several labels, including WD Gold for enterprise use, WD Purple for video surveillance, WD Red for network-attached storage, WD Blue for PCs and WD_BLACK for gaming.
Portfolio shift
G-DRIVE has long been a recognised name in creator storage, particularly for portable and desktop external drives. WD is now positioning it as the umbrella brand for creator-focused external storage across form factors and capacities.
“G-DRIVE has become synonymous with reliable, high-capacity, high-performance storage for all creatives and all stages, from enthusiast to professional,” said Darrin Bulik, Director of Product Management at WD.
“By consolidating our content creator storage portfolio under this established and trusted brand, we’re honouring that legacy while leveraging WD’s industry-leading storage innovations to deliver the tools creators need to bring their vision to life. This commitment means more product choices now and in the future, backed by the quality and reliability that creators depend on,” Bulik said.
The rebrand covers products used across the “full creative lifecycle”, from capture through editing, backup and post-production. Existing SanDisk Professional HDD-based products will continue to receive support and warranty coverage.
Initial line-up
The first wave of products under the renewed G-DRIVE identity includes rugged portable drives, single-disk desktop products and higher-capacity RAID systems for studio and on-location use.
G-DRIVE ArmourATD is the rugged portable option. It comes in capacities up to 6TB and features shock resistance and an IP54 rating for dust and water ingress protection. It uses an aluminium enclosure and is designed for mobile work such as location shoots.
For fixed workstations, the standard G-DRIVE desktop drive reaches up to 26TB. It uses Ultrastar hard drives, which are part of WD’s higher-capacity HDD portfolio. The drive is aimed at large photo libraries, video editing, backup and archiving.
G-DRIVE Project sits above the standard desktop model as a single-bay Thunderbolt 3 unit. It also goes up to 26TB and uses Ultrastar HDD storage. It is aimed at users who connect storage directly to editing systems and need sustained throughput for larger media files.
At the RAID end of the range, G-RAID Project 2 is a dual-bay Thunderbolt 3 system with capacities up to 52TB. It ships configured as RAID 0 and uses field-swappable Ultrastar drives. Dual-bay RAID devices are typically used to stripe disks for higher transfer speeds or mirror disks for redundancy, depending on configuration.
Higher-capacity Shuttle products will remain in the G-DRIVE family as the G-RAID Shuttle 4 and G-RAID Shuttle 8. These transportable arrays have four and eight bays, with capacities reaching 208TB. They ship in RAID 5 by default and use hot-swappable Ultrastar drives, a setup common in on-set data handling and multi-camera productions where teams rotate storage media and manage large volumes of footage.
The line-up suggests WD is maintaining a broad set of connection options and form factors for creators, from single-drive portable storage to multi-bay arrays used in production environments.
WD will continue to offer its HDD portfolio under its other established brands alongside the G-DRIVE creator range.