Sandisk iXpand Flash Drive 16 GB Review

Is your iPhone or iPad filled with lots of data? There are solutions, either you use Apple's storage or use an external drive that lets your backup your device data easily. Sandisk came up with the second solution and introduced iXpand flash drive. The drive has a fairly large body which gets the metallic silver finish on the top. Though it looks pretty but the design is bulky than other USB storage options as it has a battery inside, but that won't works when plugged out. The only reason having a battery inside is because Apple doesn’t allow accessories to drain power from an iPhone or iPad's Lightning port. It has both USB 2.0 and Lightning connector. Using the USB 2.0 you can transfer data from flash drive to mac or any other PC.

The iXpand Flash Drive's capacity ranges from 16 to 128 GB, and the flash drive review unit we received was 16 GB. Though, it is made for Apple devices yet it was working with Windows and Linux PCs using the USB 2.0. The drive comes with SanDisk's iXpand app as well as a security program for Windows and OS X. To store the data from iPhone or iPad to the drive, you need to use the app, yet there are limitations. You can't store only photos to the drive, but not the music and videos. You can only play them through the app but can't add them to the iOS Music and Video players. You can simply get an additional space where you can store media from a PC without using iTunes, etc. and then either play them directly off the drive or copy files over to your iOS device for easier access.

In our assorted file transfer test, it took 12 minute and 34 seconds to transfer 3.3 GB file from PC to drive and 11 minutes and 54 seconds from drive to PC. While using the benchmark, it resulted with 12.3 Mb/s read and 11.4Mb/s write speed on Crustal disk mark. Using HD tune pro, it delivered 11.7 Mb/s of max and 8.4 Mb/s of min read speed. The overall performance of the drive is satisfactory though there is nothing outstanding.

The app is designed well and let you navigate contents of the drive easily and launch any supported file including music and video formats that iOS does not support the native Music and Video apps as well as PDFs and common document files. Also, it lets you check the battery charge level.