To investigate the engineering problem that different arrangement angles of sand particles may cause changes in the shear properties of sands，Toyoura sand，as the Japanese standard sand，was selected to carry out the related research. First，a special rectangular container that could change arrangement angles of sand particles was used to set different arrangement angles of sand particles，and soil samples were prepared by the vacuum preloading method. Then，a fullautomatic direct shear test instrument was used to conduct the direct shear tests，and different vertical pressures were used to simulate the pressure of the overlying soil layer with different depths to explore variation rules of shear characteristics of sand soils. In the experiments，the arrangement angles of the sand soil samples were set to four degrees: 0 °，22.5 °，45 °，and 90 °，three different vertical pressures were set for each different particle arrangement angle，and then 12 groups of direct shear tests were carried out in this paper. The test results show that for saturated sand under drainage conditions，shear strengths of the sand soils gradually increase with the increase of arrangement angles of sand particles and the vertical pressures. With increase of arrangement angles of sand particles from 0 ° to 90 °，the shear strength of the sand soils increases by about 14%，while increases by 11% with the increase of vertical pressures from 100kPa to 300kPa. Moreover，the shear modulus of sand soils is almost constant with the variation of particle arrangement angles but increase significantly with the increase of vertical pressures. In addition，the sand soils have a decay after reaching the peak strength. The shear strength decay rates of sand soils increase slightly with the increase of particle arrangement angles but remain almost constant with different vertical pressures.