SanDisk Ultra Flair™ USB 3.0 Flash Drive 512GB (SDCZ73-512G-I35), 5 Year Warranty

Prior to this, I had purchased a 2TB USB stick, which did not perform well. The transfer rate kept dropping to zero and basically giving up after a couple of minutes. After trying to solve the problem by updating drivers, etc., I bought this 512 GB SanDisk USB stick (one quarter the size and almost double the price!) to see if a better brand would make any difference. There really was really no comparison. Transferring 425 GB from an external drive took a few hours – as might be expected – and the transfer rate did fluctuate from about 35 Mb/s to about 177 kb/s, but the SanDisk stick kept on going. I would recommend this USB stick and also SanDisk as, from my experience, the quality and brand of USB stick really did make a difference.

I’ve bought several of these to use as either server boot devices (OpenMediaVault) or for installing operating systems onto desktop machines and project work.On the plus side they are reasonably fast both reading and writing and reliable, but this is to be expected as this is the specification they have been sold under.The achillies heel is their unfortnate size. Leave aside that they are unnecessarily long, they are made too large in the body such that two can’t be insterted side by side into standard spaced USB ports on either laptops with side by side ports, or desktops with over under ports. I’ve never been a fan of form over function and this is a classic example. Perhaps this is why they are, at time of writing, approximately 60% of the price of the equivalent Sandisk Ultra Fit USB 3 item.However some inappropriate use of a small modelling knife later, the outer shell can be cut off such that they can be made to fit. This isn’t an issue for me when the drive is going to be fitted permanently inside a system case anyway.That said, I’d much rather SanDisk sold me a USB stick made with less plastic of a simpler design for even less money and which fit the ports in the first place. Plainly they could.

I bought this for my (upcoming) dash-cam and it seems perfectly adequate.The retractable USB plug is on a finger operated slider and whilst flimsy has no hint of failure.The capacity, of course, is NOT 512Gb because manufacturers of these devices refuse to comply with the ACTUAL definition of byte multiples:kilobyte=1024 bytes, megabyte=1024Kb, gigabyte=1024Mb etc and instead use multiples of 1000; thereby confusing those not computer literate. Do not expect to see 512Gb when you plug this into a computer!The transfer rate seems good and as advertised and it’ll do what I need.