Review on 💾 Transcend 256GB JetDrive Lite 330: Expand MacBook Pro Retina Storage by Tammy Formigoni

The Transcend Jetdrive Lite is a great option to add to your ever-growing storage needs, especially for MacBooks. The lack of a 256GB model in the early 2015 330 variant of the MacBook Pro is indeed an annoyance, but understandably due to space issues with the chassis of the laptop itself. Try as I've had a bit of trial and error with my Mac (OSX El Capitan) took it to recognize and a few reboots. Luckily I'm running Win 8 Pro in bootcamp on the same computer and Windows recognized the card in seconds. I ended up having to reformat this to NTFS on Windows and try it on OSX, and this time OSX recognized it with no problems, although I'm not entirely sure why the exFAT format (which is the default format for a card out of the box) Problems with self-detection on Mac. The card is flush mounted BUT removal can be a little tricky due to the risk of breaking the plastic lip on the edge of the card. So be careful. I have no issues with this card automounting after waking my Mac from sleep, although the behavior in Windows Vs. OS X: I've found Windows to recognize this much faster, and every time OSX wakes up from sleep , there is a delay of 30 seconds to one minute. However, this is not a big problem. Now for the read/write speed. I tested this for several days, reading files from it and writing large and small files to it. I've noticed that the write speed is significantly faster when copying large files (1GB+), and the write speed for a 1.5GB file averages 50 seconds or less. I also copied a folder of almost the same size around 1.3GB, but the folder contained many documents (PDF, .DOC, txt, etc.), the speed was a bit below average. 2 minutes, which is to be expected, but the recording time was almost doubled, which was a little surprising as I was expecting slowness, but not that slow. Again, not that big of a problem, but something I noticed. Overall, I don't have any concerns yet, but I'll keep an eye on performance over time and update my review if necessary. It's a good buy for now, but be aware that getting your Mac to recognize it the first time can be a bit of a chore, and it'll definitely come in handy if you have a spare Windows computer or have a boot camp to test.