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Review on 128GB SanDisk Ultra Dual Drive USB Type-C - USB-C, USB 3.1 (SDDDC2-128G-G46) Gray by David Strawn

Revainrating 1 out of 5

Nothing has changed, still wickedly slow

This is for the 256GB model ordered 02/2019, although I doubt much will change for other capacities. As others have said and I've mostly ignored it because I generally trust SanDisk and I've had good luck with my products from them (and once I've had to ship an SD card back), this drive is goddamn slow. I don't know if what one poster said it's actually a repackaged microSD is true, and I don't feel like doing a $50 USB stick operation to find out, but something That's not true. I've tried on multiple computers, different formats, and different operating systems to see if I have a hardware issue, but no. Interestingly, it shows good read and write speeds of 220MB/s when running the benchmark, but in the real world write times are terrible for both large and small files. I bought a floppy disk to back up a friend's old hard drive and also gave her 140GB of files. I first tried imaging and cloning the drive directly to SanDisk, but it kept throwing an error halfway through saying the drive was disabled or was taking too long to respond. Then I moved the drive to another hard drive and started copying. The estimated time to copy a 50GB image was 3 days. I then presented the disk as a sparse package, essentially containing the disk broken up into smaller archives. It took 3 hours, 140GB files took 10. I've tried smaller files and folders. The 197MB .mkv file took 3 minutes. The good news is that my friend will be using the drive to access files, not write them, and the read speed is pretty good. I bought a drive for USB-C and USB-A functionality as she has a new Macbook with USB-C, but she may want to share files with others without USB-C ports. I figured I'd help her out by paying for a fancy flash drive instead of making her carry an adapter, but I wish I'd bought something else. If I didn't have to deliver the downloaded disk to her by the end of the week I would definitely return it and literally anything else of the same capacity. You'll find that whenever there's a bad review, SanDisk will reach out and offer help. You may also find that at least one person has reached out to you and SanDisk has informed them that these absurdly slow write speeds are normal and that the drive is within specs. Don't contact me SanDisk as there's nothing I can do right now, I have to send the drive in and can't return it or do any further testing (I've already spent a day trying to figure out if the problem was on my end).

Pros
  • Very good price
Cons
  • Unbelievable price