SanDisk iXpand Flash Drive Luxe
Transfer files between devices
$44.99 (64GB); $59.99 (128GB); $89.99 (256GB)
From
SanDisk, shop.westerndigital.com
Features 2–in–1 flash drive, USB–C 3.1 and Lightning connectors
While you can use AirDrop to shuttle files between devices, sometimes an external drive works best, especially if your iPhone, iPad, or Mac has limited storage. The iXpand Flash Drive Luxe aims to solve this. Transferring files between the two devices isn’t seamless. The Apple TV app on iOS/iPadOS, for example, won’t recognize iTunes media on external drives, but it’s possible to play third–party videos using iOS/iPadOS compatible apps. One way to make accessing the contents of the drive easier on iOS/iPadOS is to use SanDisk’s iXpand Drive app, which makes it easy to back up and sync photos, videos, and other files… if it worked. In iOS and iPadOS 14.4 on iPhone 12 Pro and a fourth-gen iPad Air the app consistently crashed on startup — hopefully this’ll be resolved soon. As for the drive, transfer speeds are leisurely compared to an SSD, averaging 33.5MB/s (read) and 90.7MB/s (write) speeds in our 5GB Blackmagic Disk Speed Test benchmark.