Transcend 128GB JetDrive Lite 130 Expansion Card

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Still nothing back from Transcend, so I tried a few things myself.

As mentioned in my original question, the SD Association (of which Transcend are a member) cite performance impacts as a reason against using standard drive formatters.

However, they have a formatter available for download at https://www.sdcard.org/downloads/formatter_4. On Mavericks, I reformatted my drive using this utility and recopied my files.

The results were as follows:

1. A single file 14.57GB took 4 minutes to copy. This is the exactly as advertised 60MB/s write speed.
2. 80k files, however took 92 minutes to copy. which reflects about 5MB/s

In both cases, however, the info window was as expected showing a reasonable amount of memory usage and memory remaining. So, this solved my original problem.

As a comparison, I decided to reformat as Journaled for comparison and found the following:

1. 14.57GB file took 10 minutes to copy, which is only about 50% of the advertised max speed.
2. 80k files more importantly took only 10.5 minutes.

For me, sticking with a Journaled format is a no brainer, particularly if writing lots of small files, which I will be.

TL;DR - It is probably best to reformat to a Journaled partition as it provides a more consistent write speed of about 30MB/s, no matter the file sizes. ExFAT ranged between 5 to 60 MB/s speeds, depending on the number of files being written (lower number is faster).

Hi Carl,

Thanks for the answer. I agree a little extra is to be expected. Maybe 5% is reasonable, but 250% is simply an error. Anyway, I got the bottom of it. It seemed to have been a fault with the formatting in the factory. See my own reply.

Thanks,

Rory