SanDisk iXpand™ Drive

In this little drive is easy to work with and very helpfull to keep my phone free to shoot more photos and video. I shoot a lot. I definitely recommend the drive. One concern has cost me no end of grief and that is edited video that was shot on my iPhone and edited on iMovie for iPhone was exported to the drive on two occasions where it over wrote a previous video. The previous video had been done a day earlier. This happened twice while I was in China and I lost all my edits. This happened twice before I realized what was happening and could stop the bleeding by placing videos into their own separate folders. Very inefficient, and a real pain. Not an elegant workaround but a workaround nonetheless. Hence the four stars which, considering the nature of the problem might actually make it deserve two stars, you decide. I’ve been happy with the Drive in all other respects.

I bought this device for backing up my iPhone. Everything seemed fine, the backup was flawless and quick, the ability to either use the pre created folders or giving you the ability to create new ones and even the automatic backup when connected. Everything sounds good, no? Well, not quite. I backup the photos taken with my DSLR to my phone and they have a different name than the standard IMGxxx format so I can differentiate them when I transfer them to my PC. After copying all the files from my iPhone to the IXpand, it changed the name of ALL the photos. Worse, it added a ~photo or ~video suffix to each file depending what it is. I checked on the app, but there is no option to turn that off. I checked online and it seems that it was a unilateral decision from Sandisk to change the naming convention a while ago and despite all the complaints from unhappy customers, Sandisk does not seem to listen to what the people is asking for. I guess I will keep it but backing up my phone looks like it’s going to be a very tedious job and that’s not what I was looking for. And for that, my rating is 3 out of 5.

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It’s a good flash drive, in theory, but the app used to access the files on it is seriously buggy. The “Arranging content so you don’t have to” sequence is an infuriating issue. I’ve already arranged my files, when I copied them to the flash drive! What do you need to “arrange”? Why does it take forever? Why is there no progress bar so I have an idea of how long it will take, or whether it’s just locked up? Why, after you’ve done it, do my video files link to metadata from the internet that are not actually associated with their content? In the file manager are stupid pictures of supposedly hip people that take up an enormous amount of space, instead of a clean file management interface that uses the space well. Structurally, there are other issues. The USB connector end of the drive is exposed, with no protective cap. The Lightning connector end of the drive has a teeny tiny cap, about the size of a pea, making it easy to misplace. When copying large files to the flash drive, it copies quite slowly and heats up a lot. Hoping for a next-generation version of this that addresses at least the ridiculous “Arranging content” nonsense.

Unfortunate you can't save photos from within a text to ixpand. It takes you through all the steps to save so I know the ability is there, however inevitably every single time it will reveal ERROR -FAILED TO SAVE So you end up having to take the long route and save it to your photo library first (defeats the purpose when your intent is to free up your photo library) Then, with that, be prepared to save 1 picture at a time. It's so basic you are even unable to "select all" and move all photos from your photo library to ixpand. It only allows you to move 1-10 at a time. Not too great when you're trying to transfer 1,000 pictures With that being said, it does me ok. It's just if you're looking for something that's technologically "current" , this definately isn't it

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There may be some customers out there who think, “this is a great idea to bypass my low available memory message on my phone and record long (large file size) videos.” If you have a iPhone which is one of the 8 GB or 16 GB, this product isn’t one you can use to record long videos. If you have a large amount of space on your phone available already for those long videos, this app will probably work great. But if you’re like me, and are trying to find a way to save large single video files straight to a computer via this flash drive, this isn’t the product for you. Even though there is an in-app camera that seems like it would do this, It still maxes off based on your phones available memory (not the flash drives). Great idea, hope to one day find a product to meet this need, because the iOS system keeps taking up way to much space on these low memory phones. 8GB and even 16GB phones doesn’t really give much room amymore.