I'm looking to buy/replace a few external hard drives and am looking at the Sandisk Professional G-drive. Non-pro version, since I don't need Thunderbolt, the underlying drive seems to otherwise be the same enterprise-grade 7200rpm HDD and the non-pro is substantially cheaper. Either 12TB or 18TB models, most likely.
Looking around, though, it seems that two versions are available - the newer USB 3.2 Gen 2 version
here and the slightly older USB 3.2 Gen 1 version
here. Read/write speeds seem to be similar - around 250-270MB/s, depending on the model. USB 3.2 Gen 2 provides 10Gb/s bandwidth, while Gen 1 provides 5Gb/s. Other than that (and the form factor) the two versions seem to be more or less identical.
Before I hit the 'buy' button, can I just confirm that there should be no performance difference between the two models, given that the read/write speed is the limiting factor, rather than the USB bandwidth? Mostly interested in the speed of reading and writing large Photoshop files. Or is there more to it than the read/write speed and the bandwidth? (I'm guessing both drives will have some cache memory, but even a few hundred MB isn't going to make much difference when opening or saving multi-gigabyte TIFF and PSB files).
