Lexar JumpDrive S45 USB 3.0 Flash Drive product reviews

Nothing is quite as annoying as running out of storage space on your laptop or notebook... or 4GB budget-model XBox 360. Rejoice, brothers and sisters, for salvation is in the palm of your hand... if you happen to be holding one of these little puppies.

A couple of years ago, when The Warehouse did something insane and sold a bunch of 4GB X360's for $149, I snapped one up because I had a stack of X360 games I was given, and nothing to play them on. Now, I'm not much of a gamer to be honest, but I have kids and quite a few of the games were age-appropriate for my lads... and it came with a Kinect so I figured I could always get into fitness in a private arena where I didn't have to feel self-conscious. Great theory, anyway. o

Anyway, roll on a year or so and multiple save-games, some free DLC bonus content, and the 4GB of onboard storage is now full. Seriously, the system simply refused to save any more game checkpoints, which upset my youngest a lot. In desperation, I started to think about what options I had - I didn't know if I could just slap in a USB hard-drive - which I would have to go out and buy anyway - and then I happened to see this sitting on my desk. "Worth a crack, Nigel..." thought I to my oneses.

Hardest thing about this plan was actually getting the drive out of its packaging. The unit clung to it's little moulded-plastic cubby like I was trying to rip it from it's dying mother's arms... but I prevailed (with the very careful application of a craft knife) and slotted it into the console's USB port. Instant success - the console stopped bleating and gave me the option to select the USB drive as the default storage, and the drive performed flawlessly.

After the youngest was in bed, I pulled the unit from the console and plugged it into the USB 3 port on the PC, so I could a) see if the XBox had formatted the drive, and b) what sort of read/write speeds I could get. Addressing my forst question - nope. Thankfully the X360 had not created some strange platform-specific formatting - in fact I was able to browse the save-game data (a bunch of files that contained a mash of hexadecimal gibberish unrecognisable to me) on the PC quite easily - giving me hope that if I do get that tasty little 2TB HDD I have my eye on as expanded console storage, I can migrate the save data easily.

Addressing the second question, I had to spend half an hour doing a multitude of read/write tests using a USB 2.0 pendrive as a benchmark to ensure I actually did have a solid USB 3.0 'channel' operating. After the tests - reading and writing a single 10GB file, 20GB of small text-only files, 20GB of a mix of text and image files, and finally a 2GB video montage - I found that I could get a decent, steady write-speed of 39-41MB/sec - which is pretty good for real-world non-lab conditions - and an average read speed of 106MB/sec - only 71% of the maximum stated. I put this down entirely to 'other background tasks' slowing the test system down. Unfortunately, Windows is a pig about some things, and refused to let me disable the tasks, so I chose to leave it at this as more of a 'real-world' scenario.

The drive comes with a complimentary install of SecureStick Lite - a basic drive-encryption tool that allows you to password-protect the data you write to this drive. I gave this a run-through and found it to be a very useful bit of free kit. You do need to keep in mind however that this *is* a "lite" version, and you do get prompted to upgrade to the "full" version with a heavy Lexar-sponsored discount applied. I won't go into the details of the software, as it is not a Lexar product and not actually the product under consideration for this review - however, I did like it being a pre-installed part of your purchase.

Overall, this is a great little device, and I point out the "little" - it's the same size as a typical USB dongle device - such as a plug-in transceiver for Bluetooth or wireless mouse/keyboard. My only concern is that there are similar, competing devices on the market that offer the same capacity and speeds, but for around half the price of this unit. I failed to find anything obvious that would warrant this price point, so I can't really say it's good value for money based on the data I was able to collect. That said, there are also many devices out there at a similar price-point that offer you far less than this unit does... so it's "better than average" rather than "leading the pack" in any way.