JetFlash 700 USB 3.0 16GB

Packaging & Contents

The JetFlash 700 ships in a flat packed piece of cardboard with a small plastic shell housing the unit. There are perforations on the cardboard making it easy to open the box without scissors or a knife. The drive comes with a lifetime warranty which is clearly stated on the bottom right of the box. There are links to the Transcend website allowing you to register your warrantly and download Transcends flash drive software bundle which includes a data recovery module. On the back of the box there is some general information relating to how much data you can fit on various capacities of flash drive.

Dimensions & Weight

The JetFlash 700 measures 7.0cm long, 2.0cm wide and 0.9cm high which is below average in terms of total size and bulkiness for a flash drive. As well as being one of the smallest drives on test the JetFlash is also pretty light weighing in at just over 10 grams, its small form factor and weight make this drive reasonable for shirt pocket use.

Build Quality

The JetFlash 700 is reasonably well made. The casing is solid black plastic and has a small hole at the back where you can securely attach a keychain. There is a small indicator light but its inside the plastic and you can only tell its there when the drive is active. The cap is difficult to remove because the shiny plastic surface is hard to grip but that's a good thing as it reduces the risk of loss. The drive is all held together very securely and has a nice simple but solid feel to it.

Test System

CrystalDiskMark Speed Test^[FAQ]

CrystalDiskMark is a free disk benchmarking utility that is very simple to use. It takes eight measurements: the read and write speeds in megabytes per second (MBps) for sequential, 512KB, random 4KB and 4KB parallel disk operations. There are more screenshots from this benchmark posted on the web than any other, probably due to its clean and simple display. There is further information, including instructions on how to benchmark your own drives, on the CrystalDiskMark wiki page.

ATTO Disk Benchmark^[FAQ]

The Atto Disk Benchmark has probably been around for longer than any other disk benchmarking software, and you can tell from its dated interface! The utility was designed to measure regular disk drive performance but it's more than up to the task of measuring both USB flash drive and SSD speeds as well. The utility measures disk performance rates for various sizes of file and displays the results in a bar chart showing read and write speeds at each file size. The results are displayed in megabytes per second (MBps). There is further information, including instructions on how to benchmark your own drive, on the Atto wiki page.

AS SSD Real World Copy Speed^[FAQ]

The AS SSD benchmarking program was recently developed specifically for benchmarking SSD's. The utility is able to take several measurements that are well suited to solid state drives. One of the tests, ISO copy, is also relevant to slower storage devices including flash drives. The ISO copy test places two large 500MB files in a folder on the drive and then times how long it takes to copy the folder to another location on the same drive. The result is reported in both MBps and time taken. It's a real-world test that gauges a drives ability to read and write at the same time. Drives that have a good balance between their read and write speed fare relatively well on this test. There is further information, including instructions on how to use it to benchmark your own drive, on the AS SSD wiki page.

Conclusion

We are a bit disappointed with this drive, our expectations were sky high but poor Crystalmark & ATTO benchmark results have let us down. We have only managed to observe a sequential read speed of 50 MB/s which is 20 MB/s less than we were expecting, there are several similar reports from disgruntled users confirming our findings. The JetFlash 700 is priced very aggressively at £13 which is a significant discount to the original prices for this drive. We suspect that there have been several batches of these drives produced with varying performance profiles, this would explain why the drives have dropped in price so much recently. In terms of performance this drive proved to be amongst the weaker USB 3.0 flash drives.