SanDisk Crayola flash drive evaluation: Distinctive, enjoyable, colourful—and gradual

Finest Costs Right now: SanDisk Crayola flash drive

I’ve been accused of being a giant child, which makes me a part of the target market that the SanDisk Crayola flash drive is being blatantly marketed to. Hints of cynicism apart…

Making an SSD imitate a crayon is exclusive, enjoyable, and undoubtedly makes the drive stand out from the group — a presumably helpful trait for anybody that I’ll clarify later. But it surely’s a really gradual author (150MBps) from the get go, and drops to 80MBps after just a few gigabytes. Yikes.

Learn on to be taught extra, then see our roundup of one of the best exterior drives for comparability.

What are the SanDisk Crayola’s options?

The Crayola is, as described (largely) — a mildly fatter rendering of a crayon. Excuse me, Crayola crayon. It measures 3.22-inches lengthy by 0.67-inches spherical on the cap, and 0.62-inches round the primary cylinder, which is barely flattened on the again (See under) for stability.

The cap covers a Sort-C connector. Whereas SanDisk doesn’t make any claims as to weather- or dust-proofing (there’s no IP ranking), I’m guessing that with the cap on, the Crayola may stand as much as most abuse. Word that the cap is just not captive and and SanDisk warns that the drive is just not for youngsters underneath three years.

SanDisk despatched me the Cerulean Blue, however the Crayola can be out there in Electrical Lime and Mango Tango (pink and orange). A Vivid Violet is within the works. All are distinctive and stand out from the group. Weight? A mere 10 grams, or 0.35 ounces.

Unusually for a thumb/flash drive the Crayola carries a 5-year restricted guarantee, although how precisely that’s restricted isn’t defined through a TBW ranking (terabytes which may be written).

To not give something away (I have already got), however contemplating the Crayola’s slothful write speeds, there’s no method you’ll exceed the drive’s limits in something remotely resembling the close to future.

How a lot does the SanDisk Crayola value?

Excellent news right here: There’s no breaking the financial institution to entertain your teenager or young-at-heart soul! The 64GB model of the Crayola flash drive is $18, the 128GB is $23, and the 256GB model I examined is $33.

These costs embody a 3-month subscription to the Crayola Create & Play app.

How briskly is the SanDisk Crayola?

Alas, these low costs replicate the Crayola’s efficiency. It reads quick sufficient at 400MBps, however write pace begins out gradual at 150MBps and drops additional to 80MBps when you exceed roughly 4GB of knowledge.

For reference, a good-performing 5Gbps SSD will learn and write at round 550Mbps. Even a quick 6Gbps SATA 3.5-inch exhausting drive manages 250MBps. Due to the low capability and gradual writes, I needed to go off script for testing and with nothing much like examine it to, didn’t create any charts.

Under are the CrystalDiskMark outcomes at a number of information set sizes. Word that one MiB (mebibyte) is 2²⁰, or 1,048,576 bytes, the place a megabyte (MB) is 10⁶/1,000,000 bytes. GiB (Gibibyte) is 2³⁰, or 1,073,741,824 bytes, the place a gigabyte (GB) is 10⁹/ 1,000,000,000 bytes.  

Efficiency was hunky-dory at 512MiB. For those who can name 143MBps hunky-dory.

The 1GiB information set truly noticed a slight bump in pace.

The Crayola managed its “prime” write fee with the 4GiB information set.

The 8GiB information set is the place we began to see the write efficiency drop-off. That’s not all that a lot information whenever you’re coping with video, and so on. Word that we’ve seen slower drives off cache, such because the Addlink P50, although that drive writes at 1GBps for a number of hundred gigabytes earlier than tanking.

When it comes to real-world testing, the Crayola took a hair over 11 minutes (662 seconds) to write down our single 48GB file with FastCopy. That’s 10 instances longer than another thumb drive or transportable drive we’ve examined over the past a number of years.

I didn’t really feel the necessity to take a look at/humiliate the Crayola additional. Apart from to see that it learn again the identical file in 127 seconds, that’s. Suffice it to say that the Crayola completely is just not the drive you wish to write various gigabytes at a time to.

In fact, in the actual world, that really covers a complete lot of sensible duties. In truth, I’m going to make use of it as my Macrium Replicate Free boot disk (I re-image my take a look at beds very often) just because it’s really easy to identify among the many remainder of my boring (looks-wise) assortment.

I’ll solely must put up with the gradual write as soon as, I don’t thoughts any ribbing in regards to the look, and its learn pace is okay for a boot disk.

Must you purchase the SanDisk Crayola?

So long as you’re conscious of the extreme write efficiency limitations, by all means, indulge. The Crayola is enjoyable, and its distinct look makes it simple to identify in a crowd. As I’ve already identified, that may very well be helpful in a write-once, read-many function.

Strictly for youths? Possibly not.

How we take a look at

Drive exams at present make the most of Home windows 11 24H2, 64-bit working off of a PCIe 4.0 Samsung 990 Professional in an Asus Z890-Creator WiFi (PCIe 4.0/5.0) motherboard. The CPU is a Core Extremely i5 225 feeding/fed by two Essential 64GB DDR5 5600MHz modules (128GB of reminiscence complete).

Each 20Gbps USB and Thunderbolt 5 are built-in into the motherboard and Intel CPU/GPU graphics are used. Inside PCIe 5.0 SSDs concerned in testing are mounted in an Asus Hyper M.2 x16 Gen5 adapter card sitting in a PCIe 5.0 slot.

We run the CrystalDiskMark 8.04 (and 9), AS SSD 2, and ATTO 4 artificial benchmarks (to maintain article size down, we report solely the previous) to search out the storage gadget’s potential efficiency. Then we run a collection of 48GB switch and 450GB write exams utilizing Home windows Explorer drag and drop to indicate what customers will see throughout routine copy operations, in addition to the far quicker FastCopy run as administrator to indicate what’s potential.

A 25GBps two-SSD RAID 0 array on the aforementioned Asus Hyper M.2 x16 Gen5 is used because the second drive in our switch exams. Previously the 48GB exams had been performed with a RAM disk serving that function.

Every take a look at is carried out on a NTFS-formatted and newly TRIM’d drive so the outcomes are optimum. Word that in regular use, as a drive fills up, efficiency might lower as a result of much less NAND for secondary caching, in addition to different components. This difficulty has abated considerably with the present crop of SSDs using extra mature controllers and much quicker, late-generation NAND.

Our testing MO always evolves and these outcomes might not match these from earlier articles. Solely comparisons contained in the article are 100% legitimate as these are gathered utilizing the present {hardware} and MO.