Quick Review: Sandisk 64GB USB 3.0 Extreme

There are a plethora of USB 3.0 drives out on the market, but what makes this SanDisk flash drive so extreme? If we run a quick benchmark using CrystalDiskMark and take a look, the answer is obvious.

As we can see, this bad boy has extremely impressive 4K random read and write speeds. Some may ask what this all means? What this means is that if you’re interested in moving a lot of small files that add up to a large amount of space (like programs, applications, a bunch of small images, etc) this is the way to go. Almost all current USB 3.0 flash drives have 4K random reads and writes in the .1 MB/s to .2 MB/s (100KB/s to 200KB/s) area. So, it pretty clear that going from .1 MB/s to ~10MB/s to 14MB/s (10,000 KB/s to 14,000 KB/s) makes a huge difference in performance.

The only real gripe that we have with this drive is with the price and with the default file system format. During our initial testing, we discovered that the drive initially comes formatted as FAT32. When we first ran CrystalDiskMark, the drive was only able to achieve ~30-40MB/s sequential read and writes. Upon formatting to NTFS and rerunning the benchmark, the speeds jumped up to those shown above and were within the advertised specification. Overall, the Sandisk 64GB USB 3.0 Extreme comes packages with ample capacity and impressive performance that really puts the competition on the edge of their seats.

The Good

Extremely fast 4K random writes
Large capacity
Retractable connector
Looks cool

The Bad

Expensive (~$60-70)
A bit large in size
Comes formatted as FAT32
(FAT32 can affect initial performance and benchmarks – to fix this issue format to NTFS)

Quick Review by XMACHINE9000