Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Before settling on the sandisk extreme, I looked at ALL the available options on the market for the past 2 years, from cheap little usb sticks, to actual stick format SSD's with big name controllers like SandForce under the hood. Most were either too expensive overall regardless of performance, or not worth looking at due to lack of performance. Somehow I stumbled on this one while browsing around, and thankfully someone posted some benchmarks that showed the 4k read/write performance, which caught my eye. The 4k read/write numbers on these extreme 3.0 sticks are in another league compared to the competition, and while not up to the levels you would expect from a modern SSD, they're beyond respectable for a USB stick. So I bought the 16GB model, and upon arrival instead of playing with benchmarks I set out to see why these things are so fast in ways other than large file transfer (which I don't care about, I never use these for storing large files but for booting operating system installation disks or live USB systems, cases where 4k performance matters). So what did I find? This stick is essentially a single NAND device (probably with multiple die inside) paired with the same controller found on Sandisks U100 SSDs. While they aren't the leader of the pack, that controller is obviously FAR better than your standard USB stick flash management controller. So quite literally we have an SSD on a stick here. If you pop the cover off this stick you will see the single NAND device, a slightly smaller square chip (the U100 controller) AND a 2nd chip, that 2nd chip is a SATA to USB3 bridge chip, necessary because the U100 controller itself is built for use on a SATAII or SATAIII interface, here the SATAII wiring seems to be in use, but that doesn't limit performance in my estimation. Probably not the cheapest design but the payoff in performance speaks for itself. So basically the layout is like this: NAND <--> U100 Controller <--> USB3 bridge chip <--> USB3 connector It's as if you stuck a normal 2.5" SSD in an external USB 3 drive enclosure, but much smaller. If you want to check for yourself, these sticks also happen to support S.M.A.R.T monitoring commands. The controller does, and the little USB converter chip inside the stick also supports S.M.A.R.T, however the operating system of your choice may not support reading S.M.A.R.T info over the USB bus, I had to find a Mac OS X driver that could do it for me before it worked (it's on Github, called OS-X-SAT-SMART-Driver). However that leads me to another bonus, due to the way this stick is designed, you can actually tell the controller to run S.M.A.R.T self tests, and you can see the wear level counter for the NAND and keep track of its lifespan, something that is pretty much unheard of on other USB sticks, but common on real SSDs in 2.5" drive housings. I consider these things a steal for the price, a real SSD controller, quality NAND and S.M.A.R.T monitoring capability. I don't see any problem with the housing either it seems sturdy enough to me and I like the retracting connector (the entire board inside moves, so don't worry there are no ribbon cables to wear out inside).