SanDisk iXpand Flash Drive Luxe 128GB, Twelve South ParcSlope
Transfer files between devices
£39.99 (64GB)/£62.99 (128GB)/£114.99 (256GB) FROM SanDisk, shop.westerndigital.com/en-gb FEATURES 2-in-1 flash drive; USB-C 3.1 and Lightning connectors
While you can use AirDrop to shuttle files between devices, sometimes an external drive works best. This is especially the case if your iPhone, iPad or Mac have limited storage. That’s a problem SanDisk’s iXpand Flash Drive Luxe aims to solve, thanks to capacities that range from 64GB to 256GB and a handy 2-in-1 design that has a USB-C connector on one end and a Lightning connector on the other.
Transferring files between the two devices is pretty straightforward, though not entirely seamless: The Apple TV app on iOS/iPadOS, for example, won’t recognise iTunes media stored on external drives and so won’t play or transfer them. It is possible to play third-party videos using iOS/iPadOS compatible apps such as VLC, though.
One way to make accessing the contents of the drive easier on iOS/iPadOS is to use SanDisk’s iXpand Drive app (free from the App Store), which makes it easy to back up and sync photos, videos and other files… or at least it would do if it worked. In iOS and iPadOS 14.4 running on an iPhone 12 Pro and a fourth-gen iPad Air, the app consistently crashed on startup – hopefully this is an issue that will be resolved soon.
As for the drive, transfer speeds are leisurely compared to an SSD, averaging 33.5MB/s (read) and 90.7MB/s (write) speeds in our 5GB Blackmagic Disk Speed Test benchmark.