Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Usually love SanDisk products - I shoot everything on Sandisk SD cards. However, this flash drive is incredibly one-sided. When files are already on it, it reads them with great speeds (150MBps). If you are copying files to a 3.1 capable device, it is great in that regard. However, flash drives are not meant to only have a file on them that will only be read. Half the point is to write files to them, to be moved somewhere else, and in that regard this product falls flat. When I first got this drive I ran a test, backing up approx. 6GB of 1080p AVCHD video to multiple locations: this drive, a 1TB USB 3.0 external hard drive, and a cheap ADATA 32GB USB 3.0 flash drive. The files were being copied from an NVMe M.2 SSD, so there was no bottlenecking from that, and I had the USB-A side plugged into a USB 3.1 compatible port on my motherboard (and later repeated, using the USB-C side on a laptop, also with an M.2 ssd inside, getting the same performance). This drive spiked to around 90MBps write for a few seconds, then fell to a painfully slow average of 20Mbps. In the same test, the ADATA USB 3.0 flash drive wrote at a consistent ~50MBps, and the USB 3.0 external hard drive wrote at ~90Mbps. For small files this won't make much of a difference, but for anything over 500MB, prepare to extend your wait times significantly. For this drive to write over two times slower than a cheap USB 3.0 flash drive is insane. The only time you get USB 3.1 speeds is reading, which it excels at, but to be able to read something from it in the first place, you first have to write onto it at incredibly slow speeds. This makes it a very niche drive, good only for writing short bursts of files, where you wouldn't need USB 3.1 speeds to begin with. If this were a low capacity drive that would make sense, but given this can go up to 128GB it will appeal to people who want to copy large files at USB 3.1 speeds like myself, and end up being a major disappointment when it takes 5+ minutes to copy a couple gigs of video. The only scenario in which this makes sense is copying files from a smartphone, but at that point, the phone comes with a USB-C cable to charge it, which would work just as well if not faster to copy files from. Cannot recommend this for any reasonable scenario.