Transcend 32GB JetFlash 790 USB 3.1 Flash Drive (TS32GJF790K),Black

No surprises here. Works as advertised. However, the transfer speed is something of a question given it is a USB3 drive. But no complains at this cost.

This flash drive is great and for the price I paid for the capacity. I basically can carry around a few thousand songs and bunch of full HD movies in my pocket! Its amazing how much flash drives have advanced over the years. I used Black magic speed test to test the speeds. It clocked the read speed at around 120MB/s and the write at 80MB/s. To be honest it is pretty slower compared to my other drives but I will take that trade off because of the capacity.

Generally this drive would be great, but in this case the quality control is bad. The activity light is non-functional. I have other identical JetFlash 790 drives and the activity light is functional. Its probably rare. One thing to note is these drives are 3-bits per cell MLC flash memory (a.k.a. TLC ). Most in this price-range are TLC; the more bits per cell the less longevity the drive has. Again, if it wasnt for this latest arrival with a non-functioning activity light, Id rate this drive 4.5 stars. The other issue that Id suggest addressing is how easy it is to bend the drive. You must be careful when inserting or it will bend the metal connector inside the casing (possibly a solder joint, or where the usb metal connector is connected to the small circuit board inside). It can probably be bent back a number of times before snapping. Just be careful. The drive is fast, and a great alternative to Sandisk drives. I will buy again in the future. Works very fast in Linux whereas Ive had trouble with another brand (Corsair) getting good USB 3.0 speeds. Virtually no matter what I do with Corsair drives, the drive write speed is horrible in Linux. This Transcend drive has a more compatible controller I think and is achieving the speeds mentioned on the package.

I have been using these for years because I have yet to have one fail on me. Unfortunately, Transcend has take off the activity LED that used to be on these drives. I will be trying some other brands since these are not so special anymore.

Stay away from this brand. Cheaply made and dies after a week or two. Flimsy connector becomes looser w use. Buy PNY. Those last.

I wanted a reliable and USB 3.0 speed flash drive at around this price (64G@$25). The reliability remains to be seen, but I have had the Transcend 16GB USB3.0 for over a year and its good and this drive has a lifetime warranty. The problem with it so far is that it is advertised as 28MB/s write speed. I loaded 13.4 GB of data and it started out at 25MB/s for about the first GB but slowed to around 11MB/s for most of the write. It took about 20 mins and the average speed was 11MB/s. This is a USB3.0 speed but not as fast as I hoped. Maybe more expensive flash drives perform better, but I dont know and am not spending more money on expensive ones just to find out. For overall value of price/capacity/performance/reliability, this is a good drive.

Slider is too loose. It moves in and out on its own when in pocket.

My computer shows a 117 GB capacity for this 128 GB storage device. Thats a big chunk to be doing without. The speed of writing was nothing like what was described for a USB 3.0 device. Example: writing a 3.7 GB folder from my hard drive to the Transcend 128 GB JetFlash 790 (using one of my Dell desktops USB 3.0 ports). The speed wavered wildly. At 35% completion the slow transfer simply ground to a halt for 5 minutes showing a completion estimate of 45 minutes. Finally it started up again and finished at just shy of 11 minutes. I then deleted the folder and repeated the test, which took just over 4 minutes. I deleted the folder again and repeated the process on my HP Spectra x360 laptop. It took 5 minutes, 20 seconds with speeds wavering wildly from 0 bytes/s to 42 MB/s. The practical upshot of this is that I never know how long of a wait I am letting myself in for.

UPDATE: After many days of having issues, I tried to reformat a couple of times with the same results, but then I used the SD Card Association formatting tool, and after it properly partitioned the drive, I got acceptable write speeds (60MB/s average) all over again with any kind of files (a lot of small files, big files, ...). OLD: First days everything was fine, however now Im getting ridiculously slow write speeds of 150KB/s! Kilobytes! Read speed continue at around 60-70MB/s, but I just cant get why the write speed is so abysmally, deficiently and spectacularly slow. Practically cant write anything more, so, in practice it is now a read only drive. This is very weird, I usually like Transcend products a lot, particularly their SD cards and readers, but this situation makes me very sad. I have tried a couple of machine, different operating systems, USB 2.0 and 3.0 ports. Nothing, it just keeps at that speed. Meanwhile I can use a 64GB SD card with a Transcend reader, and get amazing read and write speeds, so this drive is the faulty link on this issue.

I have 5 of these flash drives in different capacities and Ive been using them for a couple of years. They are very reliable and I havent had problems despite I usually do not eject flash drives properly. Im comfortable to keep all of my data from university in this flash drive(its always a good idea to keep backup though) and carry it around as I am confident it will not lose my data.