Review on SanDisk Ultra Fit USB 💾 3.1 Flash Drive - 256GB Capacity (SDCZ430-256G-G46) by Levi Stewart

The capacity is excellent. Small profile is good. The declared 130 MB is the reading speed. Please be careful. UP TO 15X write speed at USB 2 speeds. Keywords here are UP TO. I use this device to store FLAC music files that I can play in my car. I have this drive connected to USB 2, 3 and 3.1 ports for recording. I've found extremely small performance differences between USB 3 and 3.1 (between 35 and 55MB when writing 200MB to 2GB at a time). On a USB 2 port, I get about 20MB of speed on average. I'll post the test results and adjust the numbers later as needed as I'm running out of memory at the moment. The frame no longer looks like metal. I would say it's made of some kind of composite material. I believe this was done by the manufacturer to alleviate the heat issues of the previous model (which I also own). While it still gets warm when typing, it no longer feels hot like the previous model. Heat is dissipated much faster. With that in mind, I am concerned about the durability and reliability of this device when it needs to be used frequently and connected to many devices. All in all it serves my purpose. Write speed could be better and durability could be an issue. Hence my reason for three stars. ********** Edit ********** I've attached the Crystalmark benchmarks (1 @ 500MB for USB 2 and 3). I ran 5 tests by plugging it into a USB 3.1 Gen 2 port (1 each of 500MB, 1GB, 2GB, 4GB, and 8GB). The speed starts to drop as the test file gets bigger. For those who are interested, the speed distribution for images is as follows: The USB 2.0 image has a read speed of 40.22 and a write speed of 17.01. USB 3.0 image - 126.2 read and write speed. Speed 50.41 USB 3.1 Gen 2 images is the remaining 5 images plus window to copy images. Just for testing, I copied about 4 GB of video file to the hard drive via the USB 3.1 Gen 2 port (see Copy Windows Pictures). In the middle of the file, the speed begins to drop and will not recover. It looks like the video file has saved a good 64MB in the middle.