The SanDisk Ultra Fit USB 3.1 flash drive is a tiny storage device, which fits neatly into a USB port; it is available with capacities ranging from a puny 16 GB to a massive 256 GB. It measures 19.1 × 15.9 × 8.8 mm and weighs about 5 grams; at least Amazon says that is weighs 0.16 oz, and who am I to disbelieve them? Amazon sells it for some 70 USD, while in Romania Media Galaxy sells it for 400 RON, which is about 25% too much even taking VAT into account.
The device is made of two kinds of plastic, a smooth translucent material for the looping handle, and a tough and rough material, probably some sort of composite, for the part which goes into the USB port. On the top side it bears the calligraphic logo of SanDisk, nowadays a subsidiary of Western Digital. On the bottom, it bears a minute inscription stating that it was made in China, the part number, and a serial number which is different from the serial number reported to the operating system.
The device is made of two kinds of plastic, a smooth translucent material for the looping handle, and a tough and rough material, probably some sort of composite, for the part which goes into the USB port. On the top side it bears the calligraphic logo of SanDisk, nowadays a subsidiary of Western Digital. On the bottom, it bears a minute inscription stating that it was made in China, the part number, and a serial number which is different from the serial number reported to the operating system.
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| The diminutive yet capacious SanDisk Ultra Fit 3.1 compared with a Romanian 50 bani coin. |
Formatting and usable capacity
The device comes formatted with the FAT32 file system, with 32 KiB clusters, the sole partition occupying sectors 32 to 480509951. Usable capacity is 246,021,095,424, about 246 GB or 229.1 GiB, some 26.9 GiB or 10.5% less than the advertised 256 GiB. Presumably, the missing capacity is used internally for overprovisioning in order to help the microcontroller cope with the intricate management of flash storage.Since the FAT32 file system cannot store files greater that 4 GiB, it may be recommendable to reformat the device with the exFAT filesystem.
Performance
Running Crystal Dew World’s CrystalDiskMark to test the performance of the flash drive provides a double surprise:- The sequential write speed is about 17 MB/second, which is quite decent for such a small form factor device.
- The random access write speed oscillates between 0.6 and 1.2 MB/second, which is very decent for such a small device. What this means is one can run virtual machines off the flash drive without too much pain; it is definitely good enough to run a small Linux virtual server.
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| CrystalDiskMark results for the SanDisk Ultra Fit 3.1. Note that the results vary between the runs, notably for small I/O operations. |
For a real-life test, I copied 511 high-resolution photographs, totalling 3.9 GB, to and from the drive; the results were as follows:
- Writing 3.9 GB of data in 511 files, varying between 2.5 and 10.5 MB in size, took 6′ 7″, coming to about 10.6 MB/second.
Reading 3.9 GB of data in 511 files, varying between 2.5 and 10.5 MB in size, took 43″, coming to about 90.7 MB/second.
In use, the flash drive becomes hot quite quickly; this is where the small form factor doesn’t help at all. After writing some 2.5 GB, the drive’s thermal management monitor kicks in and throttles the transfer speed; for data transfers of more than a few gigabytes expect the average write speed to drop to about 8 MB/second or thereabouts.
SanDisk, SanDisk Ultra, and Western Digital are trademarks of Western Digital Corporation.
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