Hi I’m Gidon from thetechnologyman.com.
The SanDisk iXpand USB drive is a simple device
that lets you transfer files easily between
any iPhone or iPad with a Lightning connector
and your computer.
It has a standard USB connector on one end,
and a Lightning connector on the other end
that is sprung back on itself, resting in
a lip on the body of the drive.
It works with an app on iOS that lets you
copy files between the USB drive and the device
itself. You can browse files on the iXpand
drive via the app and there’s also an option
to backup your photo library, contacts, calendar
and even media off some social media accounts.
So let’s take a closer look.
Getting started
You just get the drive itself in the blister
packaging with some brief instructions on
the back - nothing else.
The iXpand is nicely made and compact, although
the folded back Lightning connector makes
it bulkier than your average USB stick for
sliding into your pocket or backpack. It weighs
just over 5g and measures 13mm wide by 17mm
thick and 59mm long.
There’s no protective cap for the USB end
which I’d have liked to see. I’ve had
this style of USB stick before, and they are
easy to dent. But it does make it very slim
for often close USB connectors on laptops.
The Lightning connector is folded back on
itself via some sprung silicone, which you
spread apart slightly to insert into your
iPhone or iPad. It rests in a small lip on
the body of the USB stick for protection when
not in use, but I found after it had been
in my iPad for a while, it took some time
to seat itself back again.
The iXpand comes in a range of sizes from
16GB up to 256GB. I’m testing the 128GB
version which is formatted as exFAT which
works on Mac and PC and supports file sizes
larger than 4GB. The smaller sizes are formatted
as FAT32 but I’d suggest using Mac Disc
Utility or Windows Format to format them with
exFAT.
The drive is USB 3.0 which should mean faster
transfer speeds, but there’s no indication
of read or write speeds on the packaging.
We’ll test this later.
It’s a little awkward one handed to spread
open the drive and insert into the Lightning
port on your device. But once inserted it
is quite a clever design, it doesn't stick
out too much and the USB portion of the drive
is well tucked away. It works if your device
has a case too. Without a case, the metal
portion could scratch your iPhone or iPad
back if you’re not careful.
iOS should prompt you to download the SanDisk
iXpand Drive app which you will need to download.
Unfortunately Apple don’t currently natively
support any type of external storage, apart
from for importing photos and videos from
a camera or a camera’s SD card. If you don’t
want to use the free Sandisk app, the paid
app FileBrowser Business does support the
iXpand drive and works well.
Using the iXpand Drive app
When you first open the app there’s an option
to setup the drive, which basically means
turning on Auto Backup, which will backup
your photo library every time you plug in
the drive. You can turn this on later if you
want.
Accept any messages from Apple regarding accessing
your device and you’ll be confronted by
the app’s home screen. In future when you
plug in the iXpand drive you’ll be prompted
by iOS to open the Sandisk app.
The Camera icon lets you take photos and videos
and record them directly to the drive. It’s
quite limited and won’t let you shoot in
4K. Plus it doesn’t seem to use any image
stabilisation for videos. But it is very useful
for quickly getting something to the drive
to copy to your computer, or if you’re really
short of storage on your device. Anything
you record will be in the Camera folder on
the USB drive.
The Settings icon lets you turn on Security
which creates a special folder on your drive
that is secured with 128-bit encryption and
can only be accessed with a password or Face-ID
if your device supports that. If you want
to access these files on your computer, you’ll
need to download Sandisk’s SecureAccess
software - I’ll add links in the description
below to the Mac and PC version.
A lot of the screen is taken up with Sandisk’s
so called “Cards” which offer various
messages about backups, links to articles
and information on available storage. The
stats on available storage were actually incorrect
on my iPhone, suggesting I had only a few
GB remaining when I had far more than that.
You can dismiss the cards by swiping up, or
reset them by swiping down.
I find the cards just get in the way and I
would prefer to turn them off, but that’s
not possible.
My main use for the iXpand is to quickly copy
a video or photo from my phone to my computer.
Or get a file across from my computer to my
iPhone or iPad. There are plenty of other
ways of doing this, including a couple I discussed
in a few of my previous videos, linked below.
But you don’t get much easier than using
this USB drive.
Tap on Copy Files. You then choose where you
want copy from. If you choose iPhone or iPad
you’ll open the Photos library where you
can select photos from Photos or Albums. Tap
on Copy to iXpand drive and you can create
a folder on the iXpand to copy the files across
to.
You can’t copy across other files in the
Sandisk app, but if you open the Apple Files
app, you can use the Share extension to copy
them across. So for example if I wanted to
copy a large Filmic Pro video file across
to the iXpand, I’d have to go into the Files
app, go to “On my iPhone or iPad”, open
the Filmic Pro folder, select the file I want
to copy across, tap Share and choose the Sandisk
iXpand Drive app. It works, but I’d like
to see full file management added within the
app.
Photos and videos are copied across fully
intact. So for Live Photos you also get the
accompanying Live video file with a video-paired
suffix. This is important if you want a 1:1
backup of your photos. You’ll be prompted
to delete the copied media off your iPhone
or iPad to free up space.
If you choose to Copy Files from the iXpand
Drive, you’ll see the contents of the USB
drive. If you choose any photos and videos,
these will transfer to your Photos library.
If for example we copy back the photo with
its accompanying Live Photo paired video we
just transferred, this will show up in Photos
just like the original with all its associated
Live Photo features. There’s no option to
convert the file - by default photos and videos
off recent iPhones using the HEIC and HEVC
codecs respectively, won’t be easily playable
on a PC.
It’s not possible to copy a large video
file across to local storage on the iPhone
or iPad without it going to the Photos library.
This is not ideal if you have iCloud Photos
enabled - you don’t want large video files
using up your paid storage.. In this case
you could browse the files in View Files which
I’ll come to shortly, and use the Share
extension to save to Apple Files.
If we copy another type of file, a PDF file
say, this will be copied across to the iXpand
Drive folder on your iPhone or iPad. This
is accessible through the iXpand app under
View Files | iPhone or iPad | Files. From
here you can use the Share extension to open
the file in another app.
You can also use the Apple Files app or another
document manager like Documents or FileBrowser
to browse to the iXpand Drive folder on your
device.
View Files allows allows you to browse your
iXpand drive or your iPhone or iPad’s storage.
Under you iPhone or iPad storage you can browse
Photos and Videos from your Photo library.
And any music you’ve copied across from
the iXpand drive to play when the drive’s
not attached. The Files tab shows any other
files that aren’t photos, videos or music.
Like the PDF we copied across previously.
Under iXpand, you can see the contents of
the USB drive under the default Files view.
Or you can sort using the same Photos, Videos
and Music tabs.
You can change the layout and sort order with
the layout button. The options vary depending
on which category you’re in.
You can playback most files, including PDFs,
Word documents, but with formatting mostly
lost, most music formats, and most photo formats
but not RAW files. You’ll need to use the
Share extension to open in another app for
those. Video support is quite good, playing
back files from my iPhone 10 and Panasonic
G85 without any trouble. I was prompted to
download another app from Sandisk called TopReel
to play some other formats including MKV files.
This is a paid app but they’re offering
it for free for a limited time. TopReel is
quite a good app if you have lots of these
sorts of files to play, but it’s a little
frustrating having to open them in another
app. And even more so if there’s no longer
an offer on to download it for free.
If you have Apple TV, Amazon Fire TV or Chromecast,
you can stream photos and videos using the
cast button when you playback a file or from
the start screen.
If you’ve enabled security, you can secure
a folder or some files by selecting them and
tapping the padlock icon. They’ll be copied
to the SandiskSecureAccessVault folder and
are only accessible with a password. If you
choose to unlock them, you’ll be prompted
where you want to copy them back to.
Lastly there’s Backup and Restore. You can
choose to automatically backup your Photo
library to a folder on your iXpand drive everytime
you plug in the drive. And you can restore
from the USB drive, if you were changing phones
for instance.
It’s not something I’ll use personally,
since Google Photos offers unlimited storage
for free, as I covered in a recent blog post.
And all your photos are still accessible from
your device via Google Photos.
If you want to get them across to your computer
for backup or because you’re running out
of space, it’s probably just as easy to
plug your device into a computer with the
Lightning cable and use the computer’s import
feature. Or even use iTunes if you can bear
it.
But if you don’t have a computer and don’t
want to rely on any cloud offering, then the
iXpand would be useful. And if you did want
a 1:1 copy of you Photo library on a new phone
without paying for any iCloud storage, this
might be a good option if you already own
the iXpand. But I wouldn’t buy one for this
purpose - I’d recommend paying for even
a 1 month subscription to iCloud photos which
would still be way cheaper.
Next you can backup Social Media, which basically
means photos and videos from Facebook, Instagram
and Google Photos.
Finally you can backup your Contacts and Calendar.
This is actually quite a useful feature, since
it can be quite a challenge to do this otherwise.
Contacts are exported as vCard files which
can be imported into many applications including
Google Contacts and Outlook. And the Calendar
is exported as an ICS file which is also easily
importable into Google Calendar and Outlook.
Transfer speeds
There are many other ways of transferring
files between your iPhone or iPad and a computer,
but few are as straightforward as using the
iXpand.
But I wanted to find out how fast transfers
were. I’m testing two scenarios: copying
a large video file across to my iPad to work
on in say, Lumafusion or Adobe Premiere Rush.
And transferring a large video file captured
on my iPhone to use in Adobe Premiere Pro
on my desktop for example.
As a benchmark, I Airdrop’ed a 3.3GB video
file from my iPad Pro to my Macbook Pro 2012
model - so a good few years old. It took just
over 4 minutes at a resulting speed of 13MB/s
- it’d be quicker with a newer Macbook with
faster WiFi. Using a Lightning cable I transferred
the file across using iTunes File Sharing
to the same Macbook Pro. It took just under
2 minutes, at a speed of 27MB/s. The fastest
transfer was to an iPad Pro that supports
faster USB 3 speeds over Lightning using the
Apple USB 3 Lightning adapter with a fast
SD card, which took 51s at 64MB/s.
Copying the same file from my computer to
the iXpand took 96s which works out at 35MB/s.
This file took 80s to copy to my iPad Pro
at 41MB/s.
Copying the same file from my iPhone to the
iXpand was slow at over 4 minutes with a transfer
speed of only 13MB/s. Although the read speeds
in Windows and on a Mac, plugged into a USB
3 port, made up for those speeds a little,
transferring the video in 38s at a speed of
86MB/s.
Sandisk also advertise copying files between
an iPad and iPhone - so I tested an Airdrop
between them too. That was quick as 86s or
38MB/s and much faster than having to copy
to the iXpand drive and then back from it.
I was a little disappointed at the speed of
the iXpand, particularly its write speeds.
I benchmarked the drive in CrystalDiskMark
to confirm my findings of the previous real
life tests. I got 86MB/s read speeds and 43MB/s
write speeds. These aren’t particularly
fast, especially when you consider the price
of the iXpand. An external SSD, albeit larger
but at a slightly cheaper cost per GB, gets
speeds of well over 400MB/s for read and write
over USB 3.0. And I actually got better read
speeds off a fairly old cheap Kingston USB
3 thumb drive - around 121MB/s although write
speeds were lower - around 10MB/s.
So it is convenient, but not necessarily the
fastest method of moving files around which
is also disappointing if you wanted to use
it just as a good sized USB drive.
Conclusions
The Sandisk iXpand USB drive does what it
sets out to do well. I do find it one of the
most convenient ways of quickly transferring
files between my iPhone or iPad and computer
- especially to my Windows PC. If I’m using
my Mac, I’d usually use Airdrop instead
but for larger files, or perhaps a whole folder
of small files, I still often use the iXpand
drive.
The other features of the drive may be useful
depending on how your use your iPhone or iPad,
and whether you’re using it together with
a computer. The backup feature is particularly
useful if you don’t have a computer, and
don’t want to use cloud storage.
It’s also one of the fastest ways of quickly
copying across some videos to play on your
travels - especially if you don’t have much
storage. And it gets around the limited support
on iOS for playing back these files.
It’s unfortunate that we have to use these
workarounds with Apple devices. Hopefully
at some stage Apple will open up their filesystem
so we don’t need to use these “special
devices”.
There’s quite a premium to pay too, this
Apple specific device costs almost 4 times
the equivalent model Sandisk do for Android
devices. Prices change all the time for flash
storage, but I’ll provide links in the description
below if you want to check current pricing.
And I would like it to be faster too - particularly
write speeds which barely make use of its
USB 3 interface.
There’s also the issue that if you upgraded
to the latest iPad and Macbook which only
have USB Type C ports, this device would become
mostly redundant.
But it is a surprisingly useful accessory,
and since it’s so small and light I always
have it with me.
*****
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