PNY Elite-X Type-C USB 3.2 128GB Flash Drive

Featuring The Vantec Single Port USB 3.2 Gen2x2 20Gbps Type C PCIe Host Card

Because USB Names Need To Be Obnoxiously Long Now

Spoiler alert!  The 128GB PNY Elite-X Type-C flash drive is $15, the 256GB is an even more respectable $26.  The days of charging a USB-C tax are drawing to an end for flash drives and that is frankly the biggest news in the whole review.  The transfer speeds are impressive but honestly the biggest benefit is that once you find the port, you won’t have to rotate the bloody drive three times before it will finally let you plug it in.

Of course, native USB USB 3.2 Gen 2×2 20Gbps Type C (henceforth referred to as USB-C…) support was rare until the current generation of motherboards, so a little physical enhancement was in order to this X570.  There are many USB-C… PCIe adapters out there, many of which use the ASMedia ASM3242 controller and the Vantec model was both reasonably priced and somewhat recognizable.  Is your PCIe 4x slot busy doing something else?

A USB-C… PCIe Card

It’s a simple install, no muss, no fuss, and a good excuse to get rid of some of the gunk which inevitably ends up inside your case.  There are no drivers to worry about, just insert it in a PCIe 4x slot and you are good to go with the latest and greatest in USB technology of the moment.  If you are struggling to come up with a random present you would like to get, USB-C… compatibility is nice to have.  Pity that DP-Alt is unlikely to be included, but then again new motherboards cost a wee bit more.

Joe Friday

The copy speeds are indeed what you would expect from the packaging, even a bit better.  When running CrystalDiskMark on standard settings we see over 200MBs copy and better than 100MBs read, be it on the add in card or natively on the Intel system.  The first file copy test is a single executable weighing in at just under 1GB, while the nasty copy is a mix of just about every file type which adds up to a hefty 1.8GB.

Thumbdrives And The “Peak Performance” Preset

Sebastian just took a look at the peake performance of the Samsung Portable SSD T5 EVO USB-C… drive so it seemed wise to try that with the PNY Elite-X Type-C… drive.  The results were a wee bit different though, and suggest that perhaps we shall forgo that setting in the future.  These two tests are representative of what the general results were.

If Anyone Is Asking About exFAT Versus NTFS

Why not get funky with a proprietary file system and just get rid of the compatibility that exFAT gives you?  Well, as you can see there are reasons to consider it if you are in a community with Gates on it.  While the raw transfer speeds in a synthetic benchmark doesn’t change, actual file copying does reveal the onboard cache to a much larger extent.  You can reformat the drive and receive a a small but measurable benefit if you are copying random files, but it comes at the cost of slowing the copying of large compressed files as well as cancelling the other OS’s ability to write to the drive.

There You Have It; SneakerNet Wins Again, Even Without Chirality

As far as reviews go, this look at the PNY Elite-X Type-C flash drive has hit end of file.  The price is very right, the transfer speed beat any other USB interface and tromps on the bandwidth many a home network offers as well.  If you need USB-C… then think about grabbing an add in card to give your PCIe 4x slot something to do, and to remind yourself what it is that happens in the dark recesses of your enclosure.