At a look
Knowledgeable’s Score
Execs
- Extraordinarily quick for a thumb drive
- As much as 1TB of capability
- 5-year guarantee
Cons
- Slide-out connector might be problematic in shut quarters
Our Verdict
The Teamgroup C212 is unusually quick and capacious storage in a tiny thumb-drive type issue for a comparatively low worth. What’s to not like?
Value When Reviewed
$98 for 1TB
Greatest Costs In the present day: Teamgroup C212 USB thumb drive
$92.99
$99.99
Having reached capacities of 1TB and past, USB thumb drives put numerous cable-less storage in your pocket. Nevertheless, most examples of the species undergo a reasonably salient deficiency—sluggish efficiency. Not so with Teamgroup’s C212, the article of this evaluate. It’s able to sustained switch speeds in extra of 400MBps to 600MBps—nearly 5 occasions the norm, relying the dimensions of the info set being learn or written. That places it on par with the pace of SATA SSDs discovered inside computer systems. Buckle up!
Be aware: See our ongoing roundup of the best external drives to be taught extra about competing merchandise, what to search for in an exterior drive, and shopping for suggestions.
Teamgroup C212: Options
The C212 is a USB 3.2 Gen 2 (10Gbps) thumb drive that measures a mere 2.6-inches lengthy (3.08 inches with the connector prolonged) by 0.8-inches broad, by 0.46-inches thick (together with the ejection change). Weight is a mere 9 grams.
It’s obtainable in three capacities: 256GB for $38, 512GB for $73, and 1TB for $98. These had been the costs from Teamgroup on Amazon on the time of this writing, with the 512GB drive discounted from $80.
The drive makes use of a Sort-A connector that retracts into the physique of the drive by way of slide change. This protects the connector when the drive is in your bag or pocket. However I’ve discovered that if you’re in shut quarters or your hand is at an ungainly angle, it may be tough to maintain your finger on a slide change lengthy sufficient to get the connector into its port.
Be aware that the C212 is hardly the primary thumb drive to make use of a retractable connector, and each one I’ve examined suffers the identical situation. I simply infinitely favor a detachable cap and would like to see the retractable connector idea go the best way of the dinosaurs.
Teamgroup didn’t present a TBW score, however the C212 is warrantied for 5 years—a really beneficiant assure for the class.
In case you have 10Gbps ports, the C212 will prevent plenty of time over a run-of-the-mill thumb drive throughout backup and different chores.
Teamgroup C212: Efficiency
With smaller quantities of information, the C212 reached Teamgroup’s claimed learn transfer-rate of of 600MBps and write price of 500MBps. Actually, it surpassed these charges underneath CrystalDiskMark 8 once we ran the smaller 1GB knowledge set. Which means for many duties, you’ll see the listed efficiency.
Nevertheless, once we threw the bigger 64GB knowledge set (our present normal take a look at) at it, speeds declined to round 450MBps. Not the claimed speeds, however nonetheless darn quick for a thumb drive.
The CrystalDiskMark 8 outcomes might not look implausible by comparability, however that is the primary thumb drive we’ve kicked the tires on utilizing the brand new take a look at mattress. Therefore, we opted to check it to the Samsung T7 Touch and LaCie Portable SSD, that are bigger exterior SSDs.
Actual-world efficiency was nice for a thumb drive, if not for a bigger moveable SSD such because the Samsung T7 Shield and LaCie Portable we’re evaluating it to. We didn’t have any comparable thumb drives available for testing and comparability. Nevertheless, I can let you know that if you happen to see 125MBps from a typical thumb drive, you’re doing fairly properly. Most are far slower than that—as little as 25MBps in my informal assessments for this evaluate.
What you received’t need the C212 for is backing up very massive knowledge units. The time beneath is reasonably tragic for an SSD, although once more, it’s mitigated by the truth that it’s a thumb drive.
As you’ll see within the seize beneath, a lot of the cause for the torpid 450GB write was that the drive slows down drastically when it runs out of secondary cache. However truthfully, write speeds of 210MBps are hardly the slowest we’ve seen out of an SSD, which may drop to as little as 100MBps even with inner TLC/QLC drives.
In comparison with bigger exterior SSDs, the C212 is considerably sluggish. In comparison with most different thumb drives, it’s lightning quick. Purchase in accordance with want.
Do you have to purchase a Teamgroup C212 USB drive?
There are few extra handy methods to bodily transport knowledge than the Teamgroup C212. In case you have 10Gbps ports, it’s going to prevent plenty of time over a run-of-the-mill thumb drive throughout backup and different chores. Small, handy, quick—that is undoubtedly one useful product from Teamgroup.
Exterior drive assessments are run utilizing Home windows 11 64-bit on an MSI MEG X570/AMD Ryzen 3700X combo with 4 16GB Kingston 2666MHz DDR4 modules, a Zotac (Nvidia) GT 710 1GB x2 PCIe graphics card, and an ASMedia ASM3242 USB 3.2×2 card. Copy assessments make the most of an ImDisk RAM disk utilizing 58GB of the 64GB complete reminiscence.
Every take a look at is carried out on a newly formatted and TRIM’d drive so the outcomes are optimum. Over time, as a drive fills up, efficiency will lower because of much less NAND for caching and different components.
The efficiency numbers proven apply solely to the drive we had been shipped and of the capability examined. SSD efficiency can differ by capability because of extra or fewer chips to shotgun reads/writes throughout and the quantity of NAND obtainable for secondary caching. Distributors additionally sometimes swap parts, although we’ve by no means recognized Samsung to take action.