32GB OTG USB Flash Drive Roundup with Corsair, Kingston and Transcend
Final Thoughts on the OTG Flash Drives
As you can see there is a pretty big difference between the various On-The-Go (OTG) USB Flash drives that are on the market today when it comes to speed, warranty and performance. At the end of the day they all just shuffle data between your Android phone and/or tablet and to a computer system. How much speed you need is highly argumentative due to the fact that the Android device itself is often the bottleneck when it comes to performance. If you are moving around a ton of data then performance matters and you’ll want a faster drive to save you time. The write speeds on many OTG drives is dismal and we are shocked to see new Flash drives coming out in 2014 with 7-10 MB/s write speeds as there are so many good controllers out there and NAND Flash that are able to run faster. Often in life you get what you pay for and in this roundup the performance went up as the price increased. This isn’t always true, but this time around it was.
The Corsair Flash Voyager GO is a wicked fast little drive on a computers SuperSpeed USB 3.0 port, but it will be chugging along at USB 2.0 speeds like all the other drives when the microUSB port is being used. We like this drive a lot due to the fact that it is a solid performing USB 3.0 drive on one end and then has the ability to do OTG USB for your Android devices. This drive can do it all and costs $29.99 shipped with a five-year warranty.
The Transcend JetFlash 380G 32GB drive is sold under part number TS32GJF380G for $21.98 shipped. Transcend was the only company that gave read/write speeds and while having up to 19MB/s read speeds and 7MB/s write speeds isn’t going to impress anyone, this was a very small drive that worked well. Our testing showed 28MB/s read and 13MB/s write speeds, so it was good to find out that Transcend was very conservative with their speed ratings. We also like how this drive has a lifetime warranty and was the only one of the group to offer such a warranty.
The Kingston Digital Data Traveler MicroDuo 32GB OTG Flash Drive was the least expensive drive at $19.53 shipped with a five-year warranty, but it was the slowest at 28MB/s read and 8MB/s write. It is a good thing that this drive costs the least as the write performance was very disappointing. The one thing about this drive that you are either going to love or hate is the flip cap design. This means that there is no cap to lose, but it causes the drive to be thick and sometimes you have to fiddle with the slide mechanism to get it to close just right. The lanyard ring on the Kingston DT MicroDuo was the only one that was cast into the metal housing, so if you aren’t fond of plastic loops to secure your lanyard that is something to note.
At the end of the day all three of these OTG Flash Drives work and are affordable in the $20-$30 price range. That makes them all relatively inexpensive and it is worth picking one up if you are looking for a USB Flash Drive that can work on Android mobile devices and your PC or Mac.
