SanDisk Creator Phone SSD Review: An Excellent Nich External USB-C Storage for Content Creators

The SanDisk Creator Phone SSD, part of the new SanDisk Creator Series unveiled at the beginning of the year, is an excellent add-on storage device for those with a USB-C-based smartphone who want to shoot a lot of 4K videos. For others, it’s a simple backup drive.

Here’s the bottom line: If you have an Android or an iPhone 15 or newer and use the phone as your primary video recorder, the SanDisk Creator Phone SSD is an excellent buy. It enables certain professional apps to record and edit videos without utilizing the phone’s internal storage, significantly accelerating the production process. If that’s what you’re looking for, get one today!

SanDisk Creator Phone SSD: External direct storage for your USB-C phone

The SanDisk Creator Phone SSD is first and foremost a frill-free, straightforward, plug-and-play USB-C portable SSD that has a USB-C port and a short USB-C cable. Preformatted with the exFAT file system, the drive is designed to work immediately when plugged into any popular platform, be it iOS, Android, Windows, or macOS.

However, it has a couple of features that set it apart from the rest.

Compact design with MagSafe attachment

The first is its compact and lightweight design, featuring a MagSafe magnet on the bottom, which allows it to attach securely to the back of a phone. If your phone doesn’t feature MagSafe, the drive includes a magnet ring to enable it.

It’s essential to note that the magnetism is only for attachment—the SanDisk Creator Phone SSD must be connected to the phone’s USB-C port via a cable to function, and you can no longer use MagSafe to charge the phone wirelessly.

On this front, since the portable drive lacks a second USB-C port, you cannot charge the phone via a USB cable, either, while using it. The lack of passthrough USB-C can be a drawback during long recording sessions, as the portable drive itself draws power from the phone while blocking its access to other accessories, such as an external microphone.

Still, this is generally not a huge issue, and in my trial, I could use my Pixel 9 Pro with the drive for some 10 hours continuously without the phone’s battery depleting.

Native storage for the phone via third-party recorder apps

The second thing to note is that when plugged in using a USB-C cable, the SanDisk Creator Phone SSD becomes the phone’s native storage. As a result, you manage its content without having to use any app.

It’s worth noting, though, that all iOS, Pixel phones, and most Android phones don’t allow for changing the storage of their native Camera app—this default app will always use the phone’s internal drive.

As a result, to record videos or photos directly onto the attached SanDisk Creator Phone SSD, you need to use a third-party app. In my experience, the Final Cut Camera (iOS) and Cinema FV-5 (Android) are excellent for this purpose. These apps are highly customizable and can record high-quality videos directly to an attached SanDisk Creator Phone SSD.

According to my calculations, a 1TB SanDisk Creator Phone SSD drive can handle approximately 20 hours of 4K content, which is more than enough for most cases. Still, you can opt for the 2TB version if you require more storage space.

After that you can use the phone itself to edit the footage or quickly move the portable drive to a computer for the task.

SanDisk Creator Phone SSD: Hardware specifications

	SanDisk Creator Phone SSD
Capacity	1TB, 2TB
Internal Storage	NVMe SSD
Dimensions	3.25 x 2.69 x 0.43 in
Weight	54g
Copy Speed (estimated)	950MB/s Write 1000MB/s Read
Interface	USB 3.2 Gen 2 (10Gbps)
Backward Compatibility (supported peripheral standards)	USB 2.0 and newer
Design	Built-in MagSafe magnetism
Security	None
Power	USB bus-powered  via a USB-C port
Package Content	Portable Drive USB-C cable MagSafe magnet rig
Warranty	5-year
US Launch Price (Current street prices)	$134.99 (1TB) $169.99 (2TB)

The nagging SanDisk Memory Zone app

Like all SanDisk portable SSDs, the SanDisk Creator Phone SSD is compatible with the SanDisk Memory Zone app (available for both Android and iOS), which provides useful backup functions. You can use the app to automatically back up content from the host device’s storage to the portable SSD in real-time.

The first time you plug the SanDisk Memory Zone into a phone, you’ll be prompted to install this app. Subsequently, the app runs each time the drive is plugged in. And that’s where things can get problematic: When running, SanDisk Memory Zone has exclusive access to the drive, preventing other video recording apps from accessing it. You’d need to manually turn this app off before you can use the drive as available storage.

That said, if you intend to use the SanDisk Creator Phone SSD for video recording, it’s best to pre-install the SanDisk Memory Zone and then remove it. In my experience, after having done that, I was no longer nagged to install the app each time I plugged the portable SSD in.

SanDisk Creator Phone SSD: Excellent performance for a phone-based SSD

I tested the SanDisk Creator Phone SSD for a couple of days with a few phones and computers of different USB standards, and it generally worked as intended.

As mentioned, it doesn’t use a lot of power. My tested phones didn’t drain their battery noticeably more with it than without. The drive never became warm.

In terms of data rates, however, the SanDisk Creator Phone SSD could be better compared to other portable SSDs of the same USB 3.2 Gen 2 (10 Gbps) standard, especially in terms of writing. The charts below show the drive’s performance when copying 6GB of data at a time.

While the drive performed consistently in read performance, its write performance started fast, on par with the standard, but quickly throttled after a few gigabytes. The more I wanted to write to it, the slower it became until it plateaued at around 380MB/s. That said, 380MB/s is generally the speed you can expect when recording an extended video. Still, that’s more than fast enough in most cases.

Conclusion

The SanDisk Creator Phone SSD is not a must-have, but a handy tool for those with a USB-C iPhone or an Android device with extensive video recording needs. Aside from the extra storage space, the portable SSD enables users to prolong the phone’s life by not unnecessarily depleting its internal SSD’s endurance, which is always a good thing.

Keep in mind that you’ll need a third-party app to record directly to the SanDisk Creator Phone SSD, which is generally the case for most content creators. In this case, the portable SSD definitely lives up to its name. Consider one today!