I was looking for a new flash drive, and I came across this little drive made by Samsung. I figured this would be a good choice, seeing the advertised 400 MB/s read speed and type-C connector. So I got two 256 GB models from Amazon.de, for about €37 each. It’s a lot less than the MSRP of €61, and I wouldn’t have bought them for that price anyway. The Samsung Evo Plus 256GB micro-sd card sells for about €27, so in my opinion, €37 doesn’t seem bad at all for this one.
This drive has a type-C connector, which makes it very future-proof and it’s perfect for mobile devices. It’s made of blue plastic. I prefer that over say, metal, because it means it won’t be scratching things in your pocket or bag. There’s a cap on this drive, but it’s not connected to the rest of its body, and Samsung does not provide a way to attach the two parts, even though there are two holes cut out for it. It seems like the cap is very easy to lose if you’re not careful.
Benchmarks
To test the speed of this drive, I will use CrystalDiskMark 8.0.4c, and copy some files to it.
First, I will fill 50% of the drive (128 GB) using VeraCrypt to write random data to it to see how the drive performs with some data on it (as flash-based storage often degrades in speed the more it is filled), and then I will copy one 16 GiB file and ten thousand 955 KB files (totalling 9.55 GB). These are supposed to reflect real-word performance.
On their website, Samsung advertises a read speed of 400 MB/s, although the write speed is not mentioned anywhere. It will be interesting to see what that will be, as flash drives often boast about their read speeds despite having (very) low write speeds. Here are the results:
CrystalDiskMark
16 GiB file, PC to drive
10,000 files, PC to drive
As you can see, the results are solid, even the real-world speeds. All speeds remained consistent throughout, which is quite rare for flash drives, in my experience (especially cheaper ones). This suggests to me that Samsung is using high-quality flash chips in this one. The write speeds are good, but they could certainly be better at this price point, especially when boasting those 400 MB/s read speeds. Both drives I ordered performed the same.
Conclusion
It’s a nice little flash drive, and I definitely recommend it, as long as you’re not paying more than $40 for one.
Final verdict: 8/10
Pros
- Small size
- Good performance
- Plastic build
Cons
- The cap is easy to lose
- Write speeds could be better
- No 512 GB model available