Ondrej Holzman The cloud is gaining ground for data storage of all kinds. However, there are situations when a traditional iron and a good old "bottle" are not better. Transcend is now offering the JetDrive Go 300 flash drive, which will especially interest owners of iPhones and iPads. It has a classic USB on one side, and Lightning on the other.
Transcend's idea is that the 32GB or 64GB JetDrive Go 300 will serve as a very fast expansion of the running out of memory on the iPhone or iPad, especially by transferring photos or videos. In addition, if your iOS device is really full to the brim and you don't have time to move or back up your photos, you can take photos directly to JetDrive.
Control works simply. You install the app Jet Drive Go, you connect the flash drive and you have several steps to choose from. The most important one is probably moving, viewing and copying photos and videos between the phone's memory and external storage.
You can choose photos manually, but you can also back up your entire library at once with one click. After all, you don't only have to do this when the iPhone's capacity is full, but continuously as a safeguard.
Speed is key when backing up this much data. Transcend states that the Lightning connector can transfer data at a speed of up to 20 MB/s, USB 3.1 on the other hand, even up to 130 MB/s, which, according to Transcend, should ensure the transfer of a 4GB HD movie in 28 seconds.
But everything always depends on the hardware used, so it took us about two minutes to transfer a movie from the latest MacBook Pro 3GB to the JetDrive Go 300, and it took the same amount of time to transfer from the flash drive to the iPhone's memory so that the movie could be played even without the JetDrive connected. However, even so, the whole action is probably faster than uploading data via the cloud.
In addition to playing movies, the JetDrive Go app can natively display and play images, music, and documents. For example, the built-in video player can't do more than play the file, and you can't upload to other applications directly from the JetDrive. All communication is limited only to the official application with MFI certification.
But let's go back to the aforementioned photo backup. Automatic backup can be done with one click, and during the subsequent process, you must not remove JetDrive from your iPhone or iPad. You can back up videos, photos, or both at the same time, and an important setting concerns iCloud data.
If you use the Photo Library on iCloud, you do not need to have all the photos downloaded on your iPhone. JetDrive Go 300 then backs up only those that are completely downloaded on the device. In practice, it works in such a way that the application writes that it backs up all 2 photos, but in the end only 401 of them appear on the disk, because the rest were in iCloud.
In our test, the aforementioned 1 photos totaled 581GB and took more than an hour to transfer. At the same time, it's not a good idea to back up with a low battery because you can't charge with the JetDrive connected, and during our hour-long backup, when the iPhone was otherwise practically idle, the process took over 3,19% of the battery.
The JetDrive Go application can also access photos in the cloud, you only need to check the appropriate button before backing up, but the whole process then takes an extremely long time. The app needs internet access as it is constantly downloading data. Therefore, we recommend backing up only the data downloaded to the device.
If you would like a double-sided flash drive from Transcend, which you connect one side to a PC or Mac and the other to an iPhone or iPad (you cannot connect both sides at the same time), you can choose from two sizes: 32GB capacity costs 1 crowns, 599GB capacity costs 64 crowns.
The Leef iBridge can do exactly the same thing, I feel that it is more beautiful and it still works for me without any problems
The Leef is well designed, but it comes at a rather high price and it only has USB2.0 on the PC side.
If you compare it with Transcend, for example, for 32GB, the price is about 1600 against 2000, while Transcend will be significantly faster in the "PC/MAC part of the transfer" (of course, it doesn't matter with an older Mac with USB 2.0).
In any case, the growth of competition is a benefit, there is probably no discussion about that.
There are more such solutions on the market, and the PhotoFast brand, for example, has many years of experience in this. Their iOS application is already very far in this regard, it can transfer files between multiple applications, lock the "flash drive" independently of both connectors (also using TID) and with their MemoryCable you can even charge the iOS device while the "flash drive" is connected, or even completely and automatically back up. The differences between the individual brands are then in the details, which are ultimately quite important in practice - whether it is the capabilities or limitations of applications for communicating with "flash drives", or the options for connecting the "flash drive" to the device in the package, placing the device with the connected flash drive on a flat pad, etc.
I use a SanDisk Wireless stick 128GB and I am very satisfied, communication via the infrastructure works reliably and peer to peer as well. I can only recommend. The application also allows you to export and import with other applications.