Transcend512GB JDL330, Expansion Card for MacBook M4 Pro 2024, 2023, 2021, Lightweight Design, Up to 95 MB/s, JetDrive Lite 330 - TS512GJDL330

Back in November, I upgraded my laptop to a 13-inch MacBook Pro Retina. It’s the first time in many years that I’ve had a brand new machine with the latest technology. It’s been a wonderful upgrade for me, but I did make one large sacrifice – hard drive space. The model of MBP that I could afford was the model with the 128GB hard drive. For some, that’s plenty of space. But, for someone who takes many pictures and tests lots of different software, the hard drive space gets eaten up quickly. Even though I felt that I could compensate for the lack of hard drive space with various cloud storage and thumb drives, my fiancé found a better solution for me – the JetDrive Lite by Transcend.Transcend, developer of various types of hard drive storage, obviously recognized this storage issue for Apple users, too, and released a special line of expansion storage to assist. The JetDrive Lite is apart of that line. It’s small, sleek and fits right in with the Apple design.JetDrive Lite is designed to be seamless with the MacBook Pro Retina. It fits into your memory card slot, but sits flush with the edge of the computer. It adds the storage space you need without adding any bulk.Installation of this little device is a breeze. You can plug it into your laptop and start using it out of the box. Since it’s 128GB of space, you can store thousands of photos or songs. Plus, the JetDrive is blazing fast. It’s built with the highest quality MLC flash and can read speeds up to 95MB/s and write speeds up to 60MB/s.Perhaps one of the nicest features of the JetDrive Lite is that it’s tough. It’s life proof. The cards are manufactured using advanced COB technology, making them resistant to water, dust and shock. So no matter what your lifestyle is like, you can rest assured that your storage is safe and secure — even if it ends up in the mud.Having the JetDrive as an ancillary hard drive has been a wonderful addition to my work flow. Even though it’s hearty enough to handle media files, I tend to keep documents only on it. One of the things I think is really cool about this device is that it is made specifically for Apple products.If you need extra storage space that is nearly invisible, I can highly recommend JetDrive Lite by Transcend."This product was received at a free or discounted price in exchange for my review. I am a technology journalist and pride myself on providing fair and honest reviews. Please feel free to ask any questions you might have."

I got this today and so have not used it for a huge amount of time, but initial impressions are great. I booted up my Mac Pro, plugged it in, and it mounted instantly. I shut down and restarted my computer several times, or woke it from sleep mode, and the device was mounted and worked properly each time (I know some reviewers had said it would't mount coming out of sleep, etc). This device is VERY small, smaller than I was expecting, and as others have said, is nearly flush to the laptop's side when plugged in - so not a drive you would want to unplug and remove often. It's very unobtrusive, and has a huge storage capacity for its physical size. I plan on leaving mine in as a permanent extra storage device. I copied several large folders with files in them to mine, and data transferred quickly and seamlessly. Seems like a great product so far.Update - I liked the 128 GB version so much I bought the 256 GB one to replace it, since the first one was almost full. I had to pry the original one out with my fingernail, which took some effort (which is a good thing - it fits snugly and there is no chance it will fall out on its own). I copied all my files to an external drive and then to the new JetDrive330, and everything works perfectly. I use it mostly for my growing movie library (videos and movies which take up a huge amount of space) and pictures There's an ingenious Mac app called Tunespan that allows you to store media files in iTunes in different locations and play them from iTunes transparently, so this has worked out perfectly for me, since my MacBook Pro only contains a 256 GB internal drive, and I was effectively able to double that.

The transcend Jetdrive Lite is a good option for expanding your ever growing storage needs especially for MacBooks. However, the lack of a 256GB model in the 330 variant for Early 2015 MacBook Pro, is really a bummer, but understandable because of real estate concerns of the laptop chassis itself.It wasn't "really" a plug and play in the first attemp since it took me a couple of tries and fiddling around for my Mac (OSX El Capitan) to detect it, and a couple of restarts. Luckily, I run Win 8 Pro on bootcamp in the same machine and Windows detected the card within seconds. I finally had to re-format this to NTFS in Windows and gave it a try in OSX, and this time OSX detected it without any issues although I am not fully certain why exFAT format (which is the default format of the card out of the box) had issues in detecting itself on Mac.The card sits flush BUT taking it out could be slightly challenging with the risk of breaking the plastic lip on the edge of the card. So, precaution there.I have not faced any issue in having this card auto mount itself after waking up my Mac from sleep although the behavior is vastly different in Windows Vs. OSX. I found that Windows is much faster in detecting it and there is about a 30 seconds to a minute delay every time in OSX wakes up from sleep. Still, not a huge issue.Now about read/write speeds, I stress tested this for about a couple of days with reading files from it and writing large and small files to it. I noticed that the write speed is considerably faster while copying large files (1GB +) and the write speed was on an average 50 seconds or less for a 1.5GB file. I also copied an almost equally sized folder of about 1.3GB but the folder contained numerous documents (PDFs, .DOCs, txt etc.) on it speeds were slightly slower to about avg. 2 mins, and that was expected but the write time was almost double which was a bit surprising in that I expected the slowness but not this slow. Again, not a huge deal, but something that I noticed.Overall I have no qualms about it so far but I will keep an eye on how it performs over time and update my review if required. For now, it's a good buy but please keep in mind that making your Mac detect it for the first time could be a slight challenge and it would definitely help if you have a spare Windows machine or bootcamp to test it with