A lot of people these days make and share their experiences online—through photos and videos—on platforms like YouTube and Instagram. Smartphones have long been one of the popular ways to make and share these, for which you need more and more storage and accessories. The SanDisk Creator SSD is one such storage disk that allows you to expand your storage and also back them up or transfer. Priced at Rs 10,999 for the 1TB model, let's see how it does in real usage:
The SSD measures about five credit cards put together in terms of size. You can latch it onto your iPhone thanks to the MagSafe compatibility. This also works for some recent Android phones. But if that's not what you have, SanDisk bundles a magnetic ring that sticks in the back of your phone, on which you can put the SSD. It has rubberised sides that make it grippy in the hand.
The magnetic strength of the SSD is good, such that you need not worry about it coming off the back of your device. The short USB Type-C to C cable seems like the right size for connecting the SSD and your device.
You can install the SanDisk app to manage the drive, though you can also work with the drive without using the app. Once you install it, the app does come up on its own every single time when you attach the SSD, which can be a little annoying.
During my usage, I found the drive to give write and read speeds of around 900MBps quite consistently without any frame dropping and video stuttering seen later in the recording. You can record ProRes 4k videos at 60FPS and 120FPS without having to worry about video choppiness. Only once, there was some drop in the video frame when at 120FPS with 10 minutes of video done, but absolutely none when done at more compatible H.264 and HEVC formats.
I didn't notice any power drawing or cut issues when connected to an iPhone 17 Pro or 16 Pro. If you want to connect an external mic with the SSD connected to your phone, you would have to get a USB Type-C splitter to use both at the same time while recording videos.
The SSD adds 1TB of storage and enables the ProRes video recording option. So, you add 1TB to your 128GB base variant without having to shell out as much as you would for a 1TB variant, while also getting that extra feature to edit your videos with extra details in the ProRes format.
In brief, if you are a content creator or somebody looking to add a physical storage and backup option for your devices, the SanDisk Creator SSD is a good choice as a compact SSD. It has fast read and write speeds, and it does the job with extra editing features effectively.
