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

Ive used these flash drives for years without any issues whatsoever, but these latest ones were a problem right from the beginning. First of all neither one was recognized and I was prompted to scan and fix them. I did this and they were now recognized, but I couldnt write on them. So I tried reformatting them and then tried writing on them. OMG! They were plugged into a 3.1 usb port, but the transfer speeds were super slow. They were advertised as 3.1 flash drives, but the speeds were below even 2.0 standards -the transfer speeds of both flash drives never posted above 11mps. Additionally (and this is not critical to the performance, but worth mentioning anyway) neither flash drive had an led activity light. All of these flash drives that I purchased over the years came equipped with activity lights which was a nice feature. The activity light was very bright and you could glance at them from across the room and see what was going on. Now nothing. They look the same, but they are not the same. I was going to return them, but a computer whiz friend of mine wanted to take them apart and test them so I gave them to him -I also gave him one of my older ones to compare against these current versions. BTW all of the older drives still work fine after years of use -and they still light up nicely. I even have one thats been plugged into my car for a couple of years (for music) and its still going strong. They were a great flash drive for the money, but now theyre garbage.

Like a number of USB drives I have purchased in the past and used on multiple computers it seems like half of them Windows does not recognize them as the size that they are. Windows would only format this thing to 4GB. But, when I use Etcher to burn ISOs to it Etcher always sees it as a 64GB drive with 63GB free for use and burns my iso images just fine.....until the drive died after being used around 20 times. Most of the time it sat in the drawer of my properly air conditioned and heated home, so a range of 68f to 75f and no other real reason for it to die to quickly. Never left it in the car and never ran around with it in my pocket getting physically stressed as I moved around. This thing never left the house but now....its dead and will be put in a drawer with a pile of others that seem to have a read/write life of two dozen cycles. God help us understand why SSDs seem to work so well but USB sticks are terrible as are many microSD cards....Kindle Fire, stop destroying those too.

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.

Transcend has always made good products when it comes to convenient, portable, reliable memory cards and flash drives. I only deduct one star because it is hard to see this device in my backpack due to the black color of the body. Otherwise, it works as it should. It is fast, it is convenient, and 32GB is more than enough for my current needs. Transcend is also very affordable, especially when compared to other, similar, products. I would recommend the JetFlash 32GB USB 3.0 Flash Drive

The sustained read speeds of ~90MB/sec are not shabby at all but the sustained write speed of 70MB/sec really blew me away.

Long term durability and robustness remains to be seen, but it worked when I got it. Ive only transferred files over USB 2.0, havent tried the USB 3.0 speeds yet. Ive put around 60GB of photos and 1080p video footage, and if I recall, the transfer rate was around 10-15MB/s (80-100Mbps) - well under the maximum 480Mbps USB 2.0 spec, but it wasnt time critical, more for backup purposes so it wasnt a big deal. Being a solid state device, Im hoping for better long term robustness from this over an external HD. So far, so good even though its only been a couple weeks. On another note, I dont really care for the USB slider form factor, as it has a tendency to push back into the casing while youre trying to connect it to the USB port. Minor criticism and not enough to stop me from pouncing on it as one of the Daily Deals, but something I thought was worth noting.

I bought four of these Transcend 32 GB JetFlash 790 UB 3.1 flash drives to create bootable Windows 10 drives to install or upgrade computers to Windows 10. I had been using some old USB 2.0 flash drives. I use a program called Rufus to transfer the Windows 10 ISO to the flash drives. The first transfer I did seemed to go really fast so I decided to time them. I timed the transfer to the 2.0 drives and then to these 3.1 drives. The 2.0 drive took about 7 minutes and 30 seconds to transfer. The 3.1 drive that I timed with a stopwatch took about 3 minutes and 25 seconds which seemed slower than the first 3.1 drive I used. Theoretically, USB 3.1 should be about 20 times faster than 2.0 (3.0 is about ten times faster), so the transfer to the 3.1 drive seemed a lot slower than it should have been. Ill be setting up more drives when Win 10 build 2004 comes out, so Ill time the transfers again and see if it differs much. Overall, though, Im happy with these drives.

When I initially got this drive to test it I was skeptical about its quality. Not only is build quality great, but so is the drive. Its about average for USB 3 drives speed wise and it has a good Silicon Motion controller in it. Not the PHISON crap some other cheap manufactures use. Would recommend, especially for the price.

This brand is my favorite USB Flash Drive the last 2 years. No Cap, Usb 3.1, Indicator Light, and finally very fast to eject by Windows. Others are much slower. When light goes out you can safely remove. If you want a bootable USB Flash Drive do not buy larger than 32gb or none will work.

The USB 3.1 transfer rate is great. but the retractable USB male connector does not lock in place and must be held when connecting or it will retract back into the flash drive.