Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

The drive itself is amazing. It's tiny, light, and fast as hell, truly living up to the promised 550 MB/s. That said, if you plan to use this drive for anything other than movies, music, and pictures, you need to format it before using it. This is especially true if you plan to use the drive to back up your phone or computer. Out of the box, the drive is formatted with exFAT and an allocation size of 1 MB. That means that any file less than 1 MB takes up 1 MB of space. 1 MB may not seem like much on a 250 GB-2 TB drive, but with the myriad of small files that show up on backups taking up 1,000x more space than normal, it adds up. See the attached pictures for a small text file taking up 2,700x more space than it actually is and a 177 GB backup taking up an extra 73 GB on the drive. I mention this because it's an easy fix. According to the command line, the sector size on the drive is 512 bytes, meaning there is no reason to have an allocation size that large. All you need to do is format the drive as exFAT and select a smaller allocation size than 1 MB. Microsoft recommends 128 KB, but you could go as small as 4 KB or as large as 256 KB and still be far more efficient than the factory 1 MB allocation size.