Review on 🔌 PNY 512GB Elite USB 3.1 Gen 1 Type-C Flash Drive - High-Speed Data Transfer at 130MB/s by Brandon Roberts

So I have 256GB and 64GB of this drive. I dig the form factor. The mechanism that closes the USB-C connector is cool, works well, is nimble. That's the problem. I have a mid 2018 15" Macbook Pro with Big Sur and recently encrypted my 256GB drive with APFS (which for me is only recommended for Mac flash drives). When I say it's slow. IT GOT SLOW! I actually decided to run some Blackmagic tests to see if the format or the encoding made a difference and here are my results. MSDOS (FAT): Read 95 MB/s, Write 130 MB/s. APFS: Read 70MB/s, Write 130MB/s. ExFAT: Read 70MB/s, Write 120MB/s. Journaled: 30MB/s read, 80MB/s write. Encrypted APFS: 8MB/s, 60MB/s write speed 8MB/s encrypted! I ran this through the file transfer calculator and it means it would take 9 hours 6 minutes 8 seconds encrypted to fill this 256GB drive at this speed. Basically, if you want secure data on this thing, copying files takes a long time, and the reading speed is also very poor. It says 60MB/s, which would probably be tolerable, but the drive is barely responsive. I just don't think it does a good job with APFS encryption.