'ZDNET Recommends': What exactly does it mean?
ZDNET's recommendations are based on many hours of testing, research, and comparison shopping. We gather data from the best available sources, including vendor and retailer listings as well as other relevant and independent reviews sites. And we pore over customer reviews to find out what matters to real people who already own and use the products and services we’re assessing.
When you click through from our site to a retailer and buy a product or service, we may earn affiliate commissions. This helps support our work, but does not affect what we cover or how, and it does not affect the price you pay. Neither ZDNET nor the author are compensated for these independent reviews. Indeed, we follow strict guidelines that ensure our editorial content is never influenced by advertisers.
ZDNET's editorial team writes on behalf of you, our reader. Our goal is to deliver the most accurate information and the most knowledgeable advice possible in order to help you make smarter buying decisions on tech gear and a wide array of products and services. Our editors thoroughly review and fact-check every article to ensure that our content meets the highest standards. If we have made an error or published misleading information, we will correct or clarify the article. If you see inaccuracies in our content, please report the mistake via this form.
MacBook buyers: This $32 accessory can save hundreds
Every time I buy a new MacBook, I look at the prices that Apple charges for storage and my jaw drops. Sure, over time, you get more for your money, but the prices are always eye-watering.
Take a look at the 16-inch MacBook Pro. It comes with 1TB of storage, but if you want to upgrade that to the 2TB drive, that extra 1TB will cost you a whopping $400.
Or, to put that another way, if you use that drive to permanently store, say, a 4GB video file, that space is costing you $1.60.
Must read: Apple releases massive mystery bug fix update for Macs
I'm in the market for a new MacBook Pro as my existing one is getting a bit tired (and the warranty will expire soon), so I've been looking at what Apple has to offer. I've also been looking at storage, and I've come to the conclusion that I can offload a lot of stuff onto external storage. Sure, it's not as convenient as built-in storage, but it's not costing me $1.60 for every 4GB cat video I want to keep.
Now, external drives are cheap, but they're not really portable, so I want something smaller.
So, I went with the SanDisk 256GB Ultra Dual Drive, a flash drive that features retractable USB-C and USB-A connectors. It's small, versatile, reliable, tough (it's been rattling on my keys for weeks and it's pretty much like new), and at $32 for 256GB, it's very cheap.
On this, that 4GB cat video is only taking up $0.50 of storage.
SanDisk 256GB Ultra Dual USB-C/USB-A flash drive
I also get the added convenience that this drive also works on legacy systems with USB-A ports, as well as my Android devices and my iPad Pro.
This gives me real world write speeds of about 55 MB/s, and read speeds of around 145 MB/s. That's peanuts compared to the speed of the SSD in my current MacBook Pro (about 1,720 MB/s write, and 2,700 MB/s read), but as cheap portable storage, it's a great solution, and far better than relying of cloud storage (especially with big files when on the move).
Read/write performance
This is the nicest budget flash drive I've used in a long time, and I've no problem trusting it with all my favorite cat videos (but just to be on the safe side, I do have backups!).