Joined on 12/14/07
Just fine
Pros: Arrived fine, just worked.
Cons: Supposedly slower disk than others, but I didn't test them.
Overall Review: I am buying only Seagate and Western Digital Green disks these days, given my history of failures of other brands. I use these disks for backups, so speed is not a primary concern, but reliability is. So far, the most recent Seagate and WD Green disks that I have purchased have had no problems.
Didn't work
Pros: cheap
Cons: I couldn't get it to work. I have some older IDE/ATA drives that I was hoping to read. I couldn't get this device to supply power to the drives. If I had a soldering iron, patience, and some skill, I suspect one could add power lines from this to power both the adapter and a drive at the same time, but I couldn't do it with the materials supplied. (There are no instructions with the device).
Overall Review: It was cheap enough that it doesn't really bother me. But if I was desperate to recover files from these old drives, I would be very annoyed.
Macintosh performance
Pros: I just bought four of these for backing up photos. This is my first time using a large USB 3.0 drive on my MacBook Air, so I can't compare this drive to any others. Using the native formatting—Microsoft's FAT—the drive is a dog. I get very slow write speeds, more like you would expect with USB 2.0. However, if I reformat the disk as MacOS Extended (Journaled) I get transfer speeds of 130-150 MB/s, which is wonderfully fast. This speed is obtained when I copy a few thousand files of various sizes using the Finder. Also, this drive is narrow enough that you can (with a little effort) get two side-by-side in a MacBook Pro (whose USB ports are really close together). Follow-up: after 2.5 years, I've lost one, one has failed, and two continue to work just fine. HP has a reputation for selling flash drives that fail quickly, but I feel that 1 out of 3 failing after 2.5 years is not bad.
Cons: No LED, but who really cares.
Overall Review: HP no longer sells this model, but I suspect that my experience is relevant to the models that they now manufacture.
Fast, a little big
Pros: I measured this device on a 2016 iMac (USB 3.0) after formatting it as FAT32 on my Mac. Using BlackMagic Speed Test, I got write speeds of about 220 MB/s and read speeds of about 250 MB/s. This was on a newly formatted, empty drive. This is quite fast compared to other flash drives that I own. Note, I have found for all Flash Drives that using an Apple Encrypted format (which you would want to use if you are storing any sensitive documents on the flash drive) slows the drive down tremendously. In this case I get writes of 75 MB/s and reads of 200 MB/s. I can't tell you how much of this is due to the flash drive, and how much is due to computational overhead. The drive is 22 mm wide, 11 mm thick and 70 mm long. It sticks out 6 mm each side from the USB connector, if you want to know if it will fit in tight USB ports.
Cons: Other drives are thinner
1 ordered, 1 DOA
Pros: 1 worked fine
Cons: 1 was DOA
Overall Review: The one that was DOA showed up as a "4 GB" drive, when it didn't cause my computer to hard-crash. I couldn't format it.
Works well with Thunderbolt adapter
Pros: Same as my earlier review
Cons: Same as my earlier review
Overall Review: This is an update to my earlier review. I now have it hooked up to a LaCie eSATA Hub to allow it to work with a new iMac. This combination works very well, and is great alternative to a hard-or-impossible-to-find Thunderbolt 3.5" hard disk docking station.
Very nice
EOL says that "we specialize in providing "End of Life" products," meaning not-quite-new equipment. The drives I received were unused, and manufactured about 2 years ago. There were no problems with the drives. Given the heavy discount to "new," I think it was a great purchase, and I recommend "EOL Tech."