JetFlash 780 USB 3.0 16GB

Packaging & Contents

The JetFlash 780 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. Unlike some of Transcends other drives there are maximum read/write speeds of 140/40 MB/s printed on the box, as we will see later, these proved to be pretty conservative figures. 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 warranty 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 780 measures 7.0cm long, 2.0cm wide and 0.8cm high which is below average in terms of total size and bulkiness for a flash drive. With these dimensions there is no chance that this flash drive will obstruct adjacent ports on a computer, the drive is barely thicker than the USB port its self. As well as being one of the smallest drives on test the JetFlash is also pretty light weighing in at just over 14 grams, its small form factor and weight make this drive ideal for shirt pocket use.

Build Quality

The JetFlash 780 is reasonably well constructed. Both the front and back are made of check black plastic and the outer edge is made of chrome finished plastic. The drive has holes in one of its corners where a keychain can be attached securely. The cap does not feel as secure as we would like and as with all flash drive caps there is a risk of loss. Inside there is a small blue LED light which is only barely visible when the drive is in operation. The JetFlash 780 does not weight a huge amount at 14 grams even though this is twice the weight stated on Transcend's website.

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 really like this drive, it's one of our favourites. The JetFlash 780 has superb benchmark scores, at 170 MB/s this drive has the highest sequential read score we have ever seen on a consumer grade flash drive. Very interestingly the performance profile on our test unit exceeded even the manufacturers claimed speeds by over 30MB/s! The 4K write speed is less impressive, but passable at 0.3 MB/s. With reasonably solid all round performance and a reasonable price point of £23 this drive represents outstanding value for money.