XINWAY 8GB USB 2.0 Flash Drive Thumb Drives Memory Stick Jump Drive Zip Drive, 5 Pack Mixed Colors: Black Blue Green Gold Purple

This review is for the 5 pack 16GB USB 2.0 flash drives. Full read/write tests on all five found no functional issues. They come formatted as Fat32 as is typical.Actual size is 15,711,830,016 bytes or around 14.6GB when formatted as Fat32. This is somewhat less than advertised, but not faked, just rounded up to the next standard size. They could be using "2nd's or B quality" memory chips that had too many bad cells to meet QC for major brands. Speeds were consistent across all five. The same hardware is listed under several different brand names (prices vary somewhat).On the plus side, they stay cool, have a red LED that flashes with activity, and are inexpensive. The main body is anodized aluminum and they are sleek looking (better than some name brand USB flash drives with poor visual aesthetics). Each comes with an easy to lose dust cap that fits securely on the end. The attachment loop opposite of the USB plug is made out of plastic so I wouldn't recommend these for hanging from a key chain. Sequential reads and writes are similar to other USB 2 drives I've tested, better than some, worse than others. A slight performance gain can achieved by re-formatting as exFat instead of Fat32 (note, verify first that exFat is compatible with your intended devices). They do not appear to be hermetically sealed (some flash drives are), and may not survive full immersion in liquid.Unfortunately, random writes are painfully slow as is often the case with cheap USB 2 drives. Random read/writes may not matter if you are primarily writing large files.I can't speak to longevity, but since they run fairly cool their lifespan should be okay. Heat is the biggest enemy of electronic devices.Digging deeper into the tech... the flash drive reports to Windows a name of "VendorCo ProductCode" with a product revision of 2.00, so in other words, it only has a place holder where the vendor and product name should go. It reports a VID of FFFF and a PID of 5678, again place holder data which is common on generic drives. Examing the physical circuit board, I can see that the controller is a FC1198BC which is made by FirstChip. The placeholder data is consistent with that of other generic drives using this controller reporting the same place holder information to windows. The memory itself was covered by epoxy with labling of JY8T2D-16GB (I found no information on this).

I bought a 5-pack of these XinwaY flash drives because of their advertised read and write speeds. BIG MISTAKE. I routinely copy to various flash drives a collection of 972 songs I have in 50 folders that amount to 7.4 GB. It takes only 15 minutes on the Imphomius brand and slightly longer on the Juanwe brand and Walmart's ONN brand. A little longer still on SanDisk. The same copy using these XinwaY flash drives takes 1 hour and 39 minutes. If copy speed is important to you I suggest you pick another brand.

Very good for the price, needed something to store files and backup os for re-imaging.

These are great for shuffling information from one device to another. I like the sleek design and the nice colors.

This worked well for about half a year, but then all of a sudden when I plug it in, it beeps to let me know something is detected, but it's like all my files are just gone. I stored art documentation, school work, and videos on it so I'm not sure what to do now.I'm still trying to figure out if I'll be able to get them back. I haven't tried the second USB it came with. I guess I got what I paid for.