SanDisk sent us their new Extreme PRO USB 3.0 Flash Drive for review a couple of days ago. The drive offers ample storage space of 128 GB and it being a USB 3.0 drive, it’s claimed to be up to 60 times faster than standard USB 2.0 drives.
The packaging of the product in fact claims that the drive offers up to 260 MB/s read speed and 240 MB/s write speed. That’s pretty impressive if replicated in real world tests. Did it match those transfer speeds? Let’s find out.
The SanDisk Extreme Pro USB 3.0 Flash Drive as mentioned earlier is only available as a 128 GB capacity drive. The drive features a sleek look and comes packed in an aluminum metal casing with a cap-less design.
All you need to do is slide the black switch on top of the device using your thumb, to connect the flash drive on to your computer. The drive also offers an area to attach a keychain or lanyard on the other end of the drive. It’s a pretty light-weight device, too, so carrying it around won’t be a hassle.
The drive comes with SanDisk SecureAccess software that offers 128-bit AES file encryption and password protection to secure private files while leaving the rest of the drive visible for sharing. The SecureAccess software comes on the SanDisk Extreme Pro USB 3.0 Flash Drive and looks for online updates the first time you go to install the encryption application.
Once the updates are applied, you go ahead with creating a password and then move any files you want to encrypt to the secured area on the flash drive. In addition, SanDisk also bundles a year’s worth of subscription to LC Tech’s RescuePRO Deluxe, a data recovery software for digital media.
In order to test the performance of the drive, we used ATTO Disk Benchmark, which is one of the oldest drive benchmarks around. The benchmark measures transfers across a specific volume length. It measures raw transfer rates for both reads and writes and places the data into graphs that can be very easily interpreted. The benchmark test was performed with the default runs of 0.5KB through 8192KB transfer sizes with the total length being 256MB.
We were really impressed by the numbers we saw on the screen. Was it for real? Yes, of course! The Extreme PRO USB 3.0 flash drive managed to deliver 263.5MB/s of read speed and 234.4MB/s of write speed on the sequential tests. These numbers are very good and among the fastest we have seen on any USB 3.0 flash drive.
Even though this flash drive is a bit expensive, if you want breezy data transfers, the SanDisk Extreme PRO USB 3.0 flash drive should be right at the top of your tech shopping list. The SanDisk Extreme PRO USB 3.0 flash drive thus walks away with the Review Central Editors’ Choice award.
Price: $145 Approx.
