PNY - Elite Turbo Attache 4 32GB USB 3.0 Type A Flash Drive - Black/Gray

I purchased four of these 32 GB drives to use as Restore Disks for Windows Backup for the PCs in my home as I wanted something large enough to not hit a capacity limit (Windows 10 asked for "at least 16 GB free") yet not with too much extra capacity that would be wasted. These fit the bill size-wise and price-wise, but the speed is not great. I immediately tested one and found that transferring a 3.97 GB file to the drive held a pretty poor transfer rate of barely 13 MB/second (once Windows caching is exceeded), so making the backup disks was going to be slow. I then copied three more copies of this ~ 4 GB file to the drive, removed the drive (to clear any caching by Windows) and re-installed it, and read back all 4 files (~ 16 GB) to my laptop's NVMe SSD, and the read rate held a consistent 115 MB/sec. A truly fast USB 3 flash drive should write closer to 80 MB/sec and read at 160 MB/sec or better. Just to check, I also wrote & read back this same set of files to an (older) 480 GB SSD I had placed in a USB 3.0 external enclosure, and they wrote at 180-240 MB/sec and read back at 320-370 MB/sec, so it definitely wasn't my laptop SSD that was causing the performance issues. I definitely would NOT recommend these for people needing to transfer large files around on a regular basis, but for my use (where I'm much more concerned about read performance than write performance), these are more than acceptable, and the price was very reasonable.

I was skeptical when I purchased this because how could something so small work so well. So after bringing it home, I turned the package over in my hands for about 30 minutes before finally opening it. I put the thing in the hole on my computer and not 30 seconds later my computer said it was okay. Whew! I was really worried about that!! I had heard you could put files like music files and documents on this and they would stay on there until you erased them so I tried that first. I put my music file of David Allen Coe's "My Dog Left Me And Didn't Take My Wife I Hate That Dog" on it. It took a while because I wasn't sure how to do it but eventually I found that the "click and pull hard" method worked best. Once I did that, it magically appeared in another box all by itself. I must admit, I clicked my heels with joy and cackled a bit. I didn't really do anything else with it yet because I'm scared that I may be doing the devil's work by moving things around so I just keep the stick in my pocket for safe keeping in case I'm ever somewhere and somebody really wants to hear that song and I can pull the stick out of my shirt pocket as the angels sing and a bright light shines on me and everyone can exhale as we do whatever we have to do to hear the song. It's a miracle from God!

I knew my existing USB drives weren't using anywhere near the theoretical capacity of USB 2.0 (I'm getting 5-6MB/second write, 20-22 on read), and guessed it was the drive, not the bus, slowing things down. So, when I saw this on sale, I decided to try one. I was right: I didn't get the 70MB/sec read speed, even though that's theoretically possible. But I got about 32-33, which is a 50% speedup. And I got the full 20MB/sec write speed advertised. I was copying big files, on the order of 50-200MB, and the speedup may not be as dramatic copying small ones: I've read that the design of these "super fast" drives is optimized for big writes. If you have videos, or other huge files, that you need to carry around, these will pay for themselves quickly in the time you don't have to spend waiting for a copy to finish. The only minor nit I would pick is that I like drives with a cap over the USB plug, so they don't pick up pocket lint and other dirt. But it looks like I'm in the minority on that, because it seems like just about everyone has "gone retractable". And I've already recommended this one to friends and clients, so I definitely "would" ;-)

March 11, 2016 TREX These thumb drives are great to say the least. There processing speed is faster than my computer, smoking fast, the quality one can feel right out of the package, the external casing is tough and going to hold up, the size is perfectly formed, compact but not stupid small, unlike many brands I have purchased. The sale pricing was the best I had been able to find, please note I was searching for quality products. I bought all of them, even one that was not the exact one on the sale, it was a newer version and being a 128 was a good deal more cost, they chose to override it for me. That's service and it feels good not to be jerked around, getting told we don't have that, you can go to another store, or order on line. I don't want to hear that, ever. If you have a sale have the product or make it right. Which is exactly what Best Buy did without question. I hope to catch them on sale again. Though I bought several, I would double up this time.

Maybe I just got a lemon but the write speed of this USB 3 flash drive only occasionally & briefly was any better than the SanDisk USB 2 ones I have. Read speeds sometimes were great; other times no better than for USB 2. Used with a 2012 iMac with USB 3 ports, BlackMagic Disk Speed Test confirmed what I was seeing in normal use: Write speeds varied from a respectable 32 GB/s down to 6 GB/s or less. Read speeds varied from a very impressive 160 GB/s down to 16 GB/s. I tried using it as originally formatted (FAT-32) & reformatted with a Mac-friendly HFS+ partition, but there was no improvement. I installed a fresh copy of OS X 10.9.3 on it to see how it would work as a boot disk, but while it would boot up OK, response was so slow that it was almost unusable -- actually worse than with a 32 GB SanDisk USB 2 flash drive! I gave it a "Good" rating for Value for Price only because I got it on sale for under $20. I will be returning it & getting a SanDisk Ultra as a replacement.

Needed a USB Flash for Summer Classes at College... I can tell it is faster than other USB 3.0 Flash Drives I have used. I have a Gateway NE 722 Series Laptop, and I can transfer files at 33mb per/sec using the PNY Turbo Plus 3.0. On my other USB 2.0, I only transfer at 7mb per/sec. My gateway laptop is a little slower than others, because I think the motherboard is a little cheaper. I have seen other laptops transfer at 2x the speed using my USB 2.0 on their computer, so my laptop is bit slower at transferring data. All that being said, the Turbo 3.0 is over 3x faster than a 2.0 on my machine, using the 3.0 USB plug in. I also have a new Western Digital 2tb External Drive - USB 3.0 that I just bought at Best Buy, and it transfers at about 89mb per/sec, so I think the Flash USB 3.0 transfers data just fine, for what it is.

There are a lot of flash drives on the market. Even a lot of USB 3.0 drives. What makes this one a 5-star drive? Yes, it is reliable. Yes, it is fast. Yes, it has plenty of storage. But none of those are the reason for 5 stars instead of 4. This drive has NOTHING on it. It is a plain, blank drive. There is no encryption software, no backup software, not even a readme.txt on it. Most drives have junk on it that I have to either delete or reformat the drive before use. This drive is a plain, EMPTY quality flash drive that is ready for me to use as-is. I hope more manufacturers follow this example.

Very Disappointed. USB 3.0 Write speeds should be no less that 80MBps, MBps is MegaBytes not to be confused with Mbps Megabits which is 1/8 the data) per second and should average 120MBps - 160MBps even 200+MBps on higher end drives, Even USB 2.0 devices should transfer at 30MBps. USB2 is rated for 60Megabytes per second Maximum transfer rate and thats 15 year old technology. This drive MAX write is 20MB per second. basically it 33% as fast as a maxed out USB 2(15 year old stuff here), if your looking for cheap and don't care about transfer speed or only have USB2.0 computers this drive is fine, if you want USB 3 speed, buy another drive. The speeds are apparently listed on the website now. Didn't see any of that when i bought mine.