SanDisk Connect Wireless Flash Drive 32GB review

The SanDisk Connect Wireless Flash Drive is only just bigger than a normal USB flash drive, but this tiny flash drive is designed with portability in mind. It’s aimed at phone and tablet users who want to share photos and media wirelessly with other mobile devices. It does this by creating its own 802.11b/g/n Wi-Fi network, so you can connect Android and iOS devices to it. The only other thing you need to do is download the SanDisk Wireless Flash Drive app from the Google Play Store, the Apple App Store or the Amazon Appstore and connect your device to the Flash Drive’s Wi-Fi network.

It uses a pass-through network connection, so you can be connected to the device and your router at the same time. This means you can use the device without sacrificing access to the internet.

To access the Connect Wireless Flash Drive from your laptop or PC, you must use its web interface. Sadly, we couldn’t upload files to the Connect Wireless Flash Drive from our PC and laptop unless we plugged it into a USB port.

When we connected it to our test PC’s USB port, we saw data transfer speeds of 4.6MB/s when writing large files and 16.11MB/s when reading large files, which is fairly typical for a USB2 device. It also wrote small files at 2.33MB/s and read small files at 11.85MB/s.

We had no problems uploading and downloading files to and from the device with our mobile devices. Up to eight mobile devices can access the Connect Wireless Flash Drive at the same time, so you’ll probably want to set up a password to secure it and make sure only those you want to access it can access it. The Connect Wireless Flash Drive uses WPA2 encryption and you’ll need to turn the device off and on again for the password to take effect. We had not rouble enabling wireless security.

As for real-world data transfer, stream video content on six devices during our testing without any noticeable lag or buffering issues. This means you won’t have to limit yourself to just a few devices if a large group wants to watch different films on a long journey. Just be aware that you won’t be able to access the Connect Wireless Flash Drive while it’s charging, as this automatically disables the Wi-Fi network.

It’s battery life is pretty good, too. SanDisk claims you’ll be able to stream up to 4 hours of video from it on a single charge, but we managed 5 hours and 42 minutes of continuous video streaming on our laptop. It’ll last longer if only use it periodically to upload and download individual files. Plus, you can set it to go into power saving mode after a set time using the menu settings.

The SanDisk Connect Wireless Flash Drive is an incredibly useful device. It has a few shortcomings, but these are far outweighed by its convenience as an extra large USB device.