SanDisk Ultra Dual Drive Luxe 1TB, Epson Expression Photo XP8600
Free yourself from dongle hell
£243.99 FROM SanDisk, shop.westerndigital.com/en-gb FEATURES 1TB, USB 3.1 Gen 1, USB-C, USB-A
How can something be both brilliant and ridiculous at the same time?
When it’s the SanDisk Ultra Drive Luxe – a premium all-metal USB flash drive with the price tag and storage capacity to match – think 1TB for £244. That’s a lot of money and a lot of data to lose – especially when you realise that the drive measures just 46x12x9mm. Thankfully, the drive’s all-metal body comes with a keyring/lanyard hole to help keep it secure, plus it serves a dual purpose: with a USB-C connector on one end and a USB-A connector on the other, it offers a neat way to transfer data or easily add storage to Apple devices like the MacBook Air or iPad Pro.
SanDisk claims a max data read speed of 150MB/s, something which proved fairly accurate in our testing. Compare that to the £258 1TB SanDisk Extreme Pro SSD, though, and the difference is stark – its read speed of 1,050MB/s (USB 3.1 Gen 2) makes it much more useful.
Write speeds for the Ultra Dual Drive Luxe are modest, with a 5GB stress test using Blackmagic Disk Speed Test clocking up an average transfer speed of 60MB/s; in our real-world tests, a 6GB video file took 2 minutes 20 seconds to copy across.
The Ultra Dual Drive Luxe is neither quick nor wildly practical, but we’re still gobsmacked by it.