Even as external hard disks and external SSDs become faster, better, and more affordable, there’s little to dispute the practicality and handiness of a pen-drive. That’s especially true when it comes to moving data between a phone and a laptop, or between multiple smartphones with USB-OTG.
For one, the SanDisk Ultra Dual Drive Go is small. It’s smaller than you would expect, and that’s both a good thing and a slight annoyance. It’s good because the small size makes it extremely handy and portable which is something you would expect from a flash drive. It’s a slight annoyance because if you, like me, drop it in your bag at the end of a day, you, like me, will be hard-pressed to find it again.
There’s also a small keyring hole on the back so you can just slide it into your keychain.
By far, one of the most important things about any storage device is the performance it offers, and the USB standard it supports makes a big difference to the kind of speeds you can get with it.
Clearly, the write speeds can be a bottleneck, especially if you’re trying to copy large files to the pen-drive, which is, in fact one of the use-cases for the SanDisk Ultra Dual Drive Go.
One of the USPs of the Dual Drive Go is the SanDisk “Memory Zone” app that comes with the pen-drive. There’s an APK file inside the drive that you can install on your Android smartphone in order to manage your phone’s storage, move files between devices, and more. It’s pretty feature-rich, but there are some features here that really stand out.
Look, I have always advocated for backing up your devices regularly. It’s good tech-hygiene, and it just makes sense anyway since devices can fail out of the blue and losing your data can be potentially catastrophic.
There’s also an option to create social media backups, including backups of Facebook, Instagram, and Google Photos. I didn’t try doing this, but the app says that it only backs up photos and videos. I’m not entirely sure why you’d backup photos saved into Google Photos since they are usually synced to the cloud anyway, but the option is there if you want it.
You can also use the Memory Zone app to delete junk files off of your phone. Basically, SanDisk made an “app-cleaner and booster apps” like utility built right inside the app. It’s good for ensuring your phone storage is clean, but personally, I don’t think I will be using it.
All things considered, the SanDisk Ultra Dual Drive Go, priced at ₹1,095, is a decent USB OTG pen-drive for your smartphone and laptop. The design is great and the read speeds are fine as well. That said, with the Dual Drive Go, SanDisk seems to be competing against itself since the company has other drives like this SanDisk Ultra Dual Drive that also comes with USB Type-C and Type-A ports, and uses USB 3.1 Gen 1 with the same claimed read speeds of 150MB/s. It’s also priced at ₹899 for the 64GB version, which is considerably lower than the Dual Drive Go’s ₹1,095 price tag for the 64GB version. I mean, even the names are basically the same, except for the “Go” part.
There’s no real reason to buy the SanDisk Ultra Dual Drive Go over the SanDisk Ultra Dual Drive, in my opinion. You can save around ₹200 bucks and get all the same things. However, if you want to get this one because of the design, and you don’t see a problem with the 40MB/s write speeds, this is a perfectly good pen-drive to go with.
