As 4K becomes the standard for video resolution, speed and storage are becoming an increasing priority for photographers. SanDisk has addressed these needs with its Extreme range of portable SSDs, and now at the lower end of the market it has launched the Extreme Go USB 3.1 flash drive.
Promising the ability to transfer a full-length 4K movie in less than 40 seconds, the SanDisk Extreme Go certainly talks the talk.
To see if it can walk the walk as well, we decided to put it to a real world test while backing up some video from a recent shoot. But before we get to the test, let’s run through some of the flash drive’s key features.
The SanDisk Extreme Go is USB 3.1, which is about 35x faster than your old USB 2.0 drives.
SanDisk says the Extreme Go also offers read speeds of up to 200MB/s and write speeds of up to 150MB/s. Not bad.
The drive is pre-formatted to ExFAT, making it compatible for both Windows PCs and Macs. And on those systems it’s compatible with Windows Vista, Windows 7, Windows 8 and Windows 10, as well as Mac OS X v10.7+.
The SanDisk Go also comes with the company’s SecureAccess software.
The flash drive comes in capacities of 64GB and 128GB. For this test, we used a 64GB drive.
Design
The SanDisk Extreme Go actually has a sibling, the Extreme Pro, which sits above it in the range. While the Extreme Pro has a metallic body, SanDisk has given the Extreme Go a plastic body to justify the price difference.
I have to say, the body design does feel rather flimsy and plasticky. I can bend the shape of the body with a slight squeeze.
Reassuringly, though, the ejector slider is robust, and when you move it the male end of the USB connection locks firmly into place.
The width of the Extreme Go is just wide enough to fit into my Mac’s USB ports when there are cables plugged into the adjacent ports… but it’s not an easy fit.
All the surrounding connections stay connected, but all the cables are pushed out at jaunty angles.
Performance
This is what it’s all about, though, right? Honestly, I’m not too bothered about the design of a flash drive as long as it can deliver the read and write speeds promised.
And I’m pleased to say the SanDisk Extreme Go walks the walk.
We tested the SanDisk Extreme Go on a MacBook Pro 15-inch 2018 2.9GHz i9, 32GB RAM. The file we copied was a 4K video about 10GB and we achieved a peak read speed of 177.3MB/s and write speed of 109.7MB/s.
What’s more impressive about this is that we were also running another large back-up in the background whilst doing this.
Verdict
The SanDisk Extreme Go’s design may not be the most elegant, but it is a small workhorse that provide a quick and simple back-up solution for your most important files.