At a look
Expert’s Rating
Pros
- Fun, enticing design
- Super reasonably priced
- Decent 400MBps reads
- Stands out from the group
Cons
- Limited to 256GB capability
- Already sluggish 150MBps writing drops to 80MBps after a number of gigabytes
Our Verdict
If your youthful children have to again up or transport saved knowledge, there’s no extra attractive or entertaining approach to do it than with SanDisk’s Crayola flash drive. But writes are sluggish, then painfully so with something greater than a few gigabytes.
Price When Reviewed
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Best Pricing Today
Price When Reviewed
64GB: $18 I 128GB: $23 I 256GB: $33
Best Prices Today: SanDisk Crayola flash drive
I’ve been accused of being an enormous 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 positively makes the drive stand out from the group — a probably helpful trait for anybody that I’ll clarify later. But it’s a really sluggish author (150MBps) from the get go, and drops to 80MBps after just a few gigabytes. Yikes.
Read on to study extra, then see our roundup of the best external drives for comparability.
What are the SanDisk Crayola’s options?
The Crayola is, as described (principally) — 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 beneath) for stability.
The cap covers a Type-C connector. While SanDisk doesn’t make any claims as to weather- or dust-proofing (there’s no IP score), I’m guessing that with the cap on, the Crayola may stand as much as most abuse. Note that the cap is just not captive and and SanDisk warns that the drive is just not for kids beneath three years.
SanDisk despatched me the Cerulean Blue, however the Crayola can also be out there in Electric 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 score (terabytes that could be written).
Not to offer 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 price?
Good information 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.
Those costs embody a 3-month subscription to the Crayola Create & Play app.
How quick is the SanDisk Crayola?
Alas, these low costs mirror the Crayola’s efficiency. It reads quick sufficient at 400MBps, however write pace begins out sluggish 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. Because of the low capability and sluggish writes, I needed to go off script for testing and with nothing much like evaluate it to, didn’t create any charts.
Below are the CrystalDiskMark outcomes at a number of knowledge set sizes. Note 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.
Performance was hunky-dory at 512MiB. If you’ll be able to name 143MBps hunky-dory.
The 1GiB knowledge set truly noticed a slight bump in pace.
The Crayola managed its “top” write price with the 4GiB knowledge set.
The 8GiB knowledge set is the place we began to see the write efficiency drop-off. That’s not all that a lot knowledge if you’re coping with video, and many others. Note 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.
In phrases of real-world testing, the Crayola took a hair over 11 minutes (662 seconds) to put in writing our single 48GB file with FastCopy. That’s 10 occasions 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. Other than 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.
Of course, in the actual world, that truly covers an entire lot of sensible duties. In reality, I’m going to make use of it as my Macrium Reflect 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 sluggish write as soon as, I don’t thoughts any ribbing in regards to the look, and its learn pace is ok for a boot disk.
Should you purchase the SanDisk Crayola?
As lengthy as you’re conscious of the extreme write efficiency limitations, by all means, indulge. The Crayola is enjoyable, and its distinct look makes it straightforward to identify in a crowd. As I’ve already identified, that could possibly be useful in a write-once, read-many function.
Strictly for teenagers? Maybe not.
How we take a look at
Drive assessments at present make the most of Windows 11 24H2, 64-bit operating off of a PCIe 4.0 Samsung 990 Pro in an Asus Z890-Creator WiFi (PCIe 4.0/5.0) motherboard. The CPU is a Core Ultra i5 225 feeding/fed by two Crucial 64GB DDR5 5600MHz modules (128GB of reminiscence whole).
Both 20Gbps USB and Thunderbolt 5 are built-in into the motherboard and Intel CPU/GPU graphics are used. Internal 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 seek out the storage gadget’s potential efficiency. Then we run a collection of 48GB switch and 450GB write assessments utilizing Windows Explorer drag and drop to point out what customers will see throughout routine copy operations, in addition to the far quicker FastCopy run as administrator to point out 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 assessments. Formerly the 48GB assessments had been achieved with a RAM disk serving that goal.
Each take a look at is carried out on a NTFS-formatted and newly TRIM’d drive so the outcomes are optimum. Note that in regular use, as a drive fills up, efficiency could lower on account of much less NAND for secondary caching, in addition to different elements. This difficulty has abated considerably with the present crop of SSDs using extra mature controllers and much quicker, late-generation NAND.
Our testing MO consistently evolves and these outcomes could not match these from earlier articles. Only comparisons contained in the article are 100% legitimate as these are gathered utilizing the present {hardware} and MO.