Back To School Digital Storage From SanDisk

Image: SanDisk

The time has come for parents, students, and teachers to get ready for the start of a new school year. In addition to the normal notebooks, pens, pencils, and other standards, today’s students need to have storage for all of their digital project files. SanDisk has some new devices ready to meet the demands of students and teachers alike.

First up is an 8 gigabyte (GB) high-capacity SD card, the SanDisk Ultra. This is a nice little card well suited for camera storage. It is a Class 10 SD card, which means it must have a minimum speed of 10 megabytes (MB) per second (MB/s). I ran some benchmarks and found the transfer speeds actually reached up to the 30 MB/s as advertised on the packaging. The high speed means that images are written from your camera faster and the card is fast enough to keep up with high definition video. For the Raspberry Pi users thinking of using this for their set-up, I was not able to boot the Raspberry Pi off this SD card.

Next up are a pair of, functionally, fairly standard USB Flash drives. The SanDisk Cruzer Facet and the SanDisk Cruzer Pop. I ran some benchmarks on these drives, and they had speeds similar to the SD card which is perfect for a standard card. The Cruzer Facet comes in 3 colors and looks nice, which is always important to some for the “shiny” factor. The Cruzer Pop flips open with built-in protection for the very small USB connector. I love this feature for rolling around in my own backpack. The Cruzer Pop is now part of my standard carrying-around gear.

Finally, there is the SanDisk Extreme USB 3.0 Flash Drive. This is a monster of a flash drive. Running the same benchmarks as the above devices yeilded staggering results. The average read speeds exceeded the packaging’s advertised 190 MB/s and actually tested at nearly 210 MB/s. The average write topped out at about 130 MB/s, slower than the number listed on the box, but the top write speeds topped out over 200 MB/s — well above the advertised speed. A full copy of my 3 GB Dropbox space took just under two minutes. The same copy with the USB 2.0 Cruzer Facet and Cruzer Pop took about twelve minutes. As I said, it is a beast of a flash drive.

Overall, I can recommend any and all of these devices. The Cruzer Facet and Cruzer Pop are excellent, compact USB 2.0 flash drives. The SanDisk Extreme Ultra SD card is a quick SD card. The SanDisk Extreme USB 3.0 Flash Drive is a beast. If speed and storage capacity are paramount, this is the drive you want. Thanks to San Disk for providing the devices for review!

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