PNY 256GB Elite USB 3.1 Gen 1 Type-C Flash Drive - 130MB/s

I bought two of these to match my two newer MacBook Pros, to use without an adapter. But... they are not good. It takes a long long time to even see what's in a folder. It takes a long long time to eject. I called PNY, and they sais it was the operating system fault.... ok, but other thumb drives that use the adapters work fine.

Nice drive for the price. Larger capacity allows you to save lots of data.I have read reviews on other name brand drives that stated drives got very hot when writing data. I chose this one due to no negative reviews concerning this. In my experience, all drives will get warm to the touch, as they create heat when doing so. When writing large amounts of data to this drive, it does get warm, but not extremely hot as other drives were reviewed.I am a linux user, and found the drive does not work the best when using the format (Fat32) that was on the drive. I formatted mine to ext4 journaling which is what newer version of linux use, which windows OS does not like at all (At least not the 8.1 or older - I do not use windows 10 so I don't know if it works with it). The drive is not usable in my older windows PC's as they all have the non type c USB ports and I have no need to use it with them as I have USB drives specifically for them.All in all this is a good drive with a good capacity to store a lot of data and has a well known name (PNY) which has been around for some time, and at a good price.

If you have a MacBook pro with only 2 USB-C ports, the size of this will block the other port.It also has the slowest speed of any type of drive I've ever had. I have it filled about 1/2 way with videos and it can take up to 10 minutes for a video to load. It's utterly ridiculous and makes it almost unusable.

I was really hoping to use this for storage on-th-go with my 2018 MacBook Pro. Unfortunately, this device is so bulky that I cannot plug it and my power cable in at the same time.The storage capacity is great, and the speed is reasonable, but ultimately, it does not do what I bought it to do.

I bought this to create a bootable windows 10 USB drive for computer I'm about to build and it functioned as a USB drive should. I gave 1 star for durability because the black outer case came discounted from the red top of case exposing the internals the first time I used it.

So I have the 256GB and 64GB of this drive. I dig the form factor. The mechanism that covers the USB C plug is cool, works well, is snappy. Here's the thing... I'm running a Mid-2018, 15-inch Macbook Pro with Big Sur and I recently encrypted my 256GB drive with APFS (which is. recommended for flash drives only on mac, which is the case for me). When I say this thing is slow... IT GOT SLOOOOW!!! I actually decided to run some Blackmagic benchmarks to see if the format or encryption made much of a difference and here's my results...MSDOS (FAT): Read 95MB/s, Write 130MB/s... APFS: Read 70MB/s, Write 130MB/s... ExFAT: Read 70MB/s, Write 120MB/s... Journaled: Read 30MB/s, Write 80MB/s... APFS Encrypted: 8MB/s, 60MB/s8MB/s write speed when encrypted!!! I ran this through a file transfer calculator and that means encrypted it would take 9 hours, 6 minutes, 8 seconds to fill this 256GB drive at that rate. Basically if you want secure data on this thing, it will take a long time to copy files over and the read speed is really bad as well. It says 60MB/s which would probably be tolerable but the drive is hardly responsive. I just don't think it handles APFS encryption well.

Works great, but because they made a wide contact, it covers both ports on one side of laptop, not so great.

Now nothing special is going on here, but you do get good read and write speeds. Works well on my 11in iPad Pro, no issue finding it and transferring files to it. A neat feature of the way it stores/protects the USB C, means you can push the red part against your device to cut down on flex and stress to the fragile connector. Though, it doesn’t extend far enough when I had my iPad in a 3rd party keyboard case. So I doubt it would work with rugged android cases as well. Not the end of the world. Definitely buy. Especially for phones and devices that don’t allow TF expansion. Great for backing up and acting as a bridge, especially ever since android did away with treating your device as an external drive.

This is a nice little drive for portable data storage, but it is slow. It supports USB 3.1 gen 1, but it performs slower than many of my USB 3.0 drives. If your requirement is to move small files to/from a computer that only has USB-C ports, it gets the job done, but expect to wait.

Good addition to computer memory. Only problem is blocking access of other USB 3.1 devices to adjacent port.