At a look

Expert’s Rating

Pros

• Extremely quick for a thumb drive
• Up to 1TB of capability
• Five-year guarantee

Cons

• Slide-out connector may be problematic in shut quarters

Our Verdict

The Teamgroup C212 is unusually quick and capacious storage in a tiny thumb-drive kind issue for a comparatively low value. What’s to not like?

Price When Reviewed

$98 for 1TB

Best Prices Today: 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. However, most examples of the species undergo a moderately salient deficiency—gradual efficiency. Not so with Teamgroup’s C212, the thing of this assessment. It’s able to sustained switch speeds in extra of 400MBps to 600MBps—virtually 5 occasions the norm, relying the dimensions of the information set being learn or written. That places it on par with the velocity of SATA SSDs discovered inside computer systems. Buckle up!

Note: See our ongoing roundup of the best external drives to study extra about competing merchandise, what to search for in an exterior drive, and shopping for suggestions.

Teamgroup C212: Features

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 large, by 0.46-inches thick (together with the ejection swap). Weight is a mere 9 grams.

It’s obtainable in three capacities: 256GB for $38, 512GB for $73, and 1TB for $98. Those have 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 Type-A connector that retracts into the physique of the drive by the use of slide swap. This protects the connector when the drive is in your bag or pocket. But I’ve discovered that whenever you’re in shut quarters or your hand is at a clumsy angle, it may be difficult to maintain your finger on a slide swap lengthy sufficient to get the connector into its port.

Note 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 subject. I simply infinitely want 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.

Teamgroup C212: Performance

With smaller quantities of knowledge, the C212 reached Teamgroup’s claimed learn transfer-rate of of 600MBps and write charge of 500MBps. In truth, it surpassed these charges below CrystalDiskMark 8 after we ran the smaller 1GB information set. That means for many duties, you’ll see the listed efficiency.

However, after we threw the bigger 64GB information 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 unbelievable by comparability, however that is the primary thumb drive we’ve kicked the tires on utilizing the brand new take a look at mattress. Hence, we opted to match it to the Samsung T7 Touch and LaCie Portable SSD, that are bigger exterior SSDs.

Real-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. However, I can let you know that for those who see 125MBps from a normal thumb drive, you’re doing fairly nicely. Most are far slower than that—as little as 25MBps in my informal exams for this assessment.

What you gained’t need the C212 for is backing up very giant information units. The time under is moderately 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 under, a lot of the purpose for the torpid 450GB write was that the drive slows down drastically when it runs out of secondary cache. But truthfully, write speeds of 210MBps are hardly the slowest we’ve seen out of an SSD, which might drop to as little as 100MBps even with inner TLC/QLC drives.

Compared to bigger exterior SSDs, the C212 is considerably gradual. Compared to most different thumb drives, it’s lightning quick. Buy in keeping with want.

Should you purchase a Teamgroup C212 USB drive?

There are few extra handy methods to bodily transport information than the Teamgroup C212. If you will have 10Gbps ports, it’s going to prevent numerous time over a run-of-the-mill thumb drive throughout backup and different chores. Small, handy, quick—that is positively one useful product from Teamgroup.

External drive exams are run utilizing 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 exams make the most of an ImDisk RAM disk utilizing 58GB of the 64GB complete reminiscence.

Each 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 as a result of much less NAND for caching and different components.

The efficiency numbers proven apply solely to the drive we have been shipped and of the capability examined. SSD efficiency can differ by capability as a result of extra or fewer chips to shotgun reads/writes throughout and the quantity of NAND obtainable for secondary caching. Vendors additionally sometimes swap elements, although we’ve by no means recognized Samsung to take action.