MEGATech Reviews: ADATA i-Memory Flash Drive UE710

You have yourself an Apple product or two. You’ve got an iPhone, an iPod touch or maybe even an iPad. Those Apple devices have a Lightning connector and a fixed amount of storage. If you are looking to expand your iDevice’s internal storage, you will have to look at something external. ADATA has you covered with the i-Mmemory UE710 flash drive, a convenient double-sided device for more space on the go.

ADATA helps you add extra storage room to your i-Device!

ADATA is known for its variety of memory products and if you are a consumer of Apple products, you know that sometimes you may not have enough internal storage. Consequently, you need to either delete items to make more room or somehow move your items to a computer or to the cloud. Imagine though, being able to add up to an additional 128 GB of storage to your iPhone or iPad without taking up much room or requiring an external power supply?

This is where the ADATA i-Memory Flash Drive UE710 comes into play. With its built-in Lightning and USB 3.0 connectors, you can easily add additional storage space or back up existing files.

The i-Memory Flash Drive UE710 comes in a few combinations: colors can be black, white or rose gold, and then storage capacity can be 32GB, 64GB or 128GB. We were happily supplied with a Rose Gold 128GB model to check out.

Design and Layout

The ADATA i-Memory Flash Drive UE710 is made of a lightweight plastic that has a metallic look but a very plastic feel. Granted, being a passive device there really isn’t any need to make use of a metallic material for the body of the drive. Under normal circumstances, it probably does not produce enough heat to make use of a better material.

The sliding tab has three positions. Slide it to the left to get the USB 3.0 connector, slide it to the right to push out the Lightning connector, and put in the middle to keep both connectors inside.

Without making use of a phone case, the ADATA UE710 fits nicely against the body of an iPhone 6 Plus, though there is a bit of a height difference. The UE710 is a little bit thicker than the iPhone. This could potentially put stress on the Lightning connector, but luckily as the UE710 is fairly light itself, there shouldn’t be much of an issue with that.

The major drawback I see to the design of this particular flash memory product is that you cannot use a case at the same time.

Actually, unless your case is designed to have about a one-inch gap all around the Lightning port, you will not be able to use the i-Memory Flash Drive UE710. I currently use a LifeProof NUUD for my iPhone 6 Plus and in order to plug the UE710 into it, I had to crack the case seal and take it off completely.

It sort of defeats the purpose if I have to remove my phone’s case in order to plug a device, right? If only they included a small Lightning to USB extension cable to help accommodate people with cases on their phones. After all, who doesn’t use a case with their phone?

Using the Mobile App

To use your ADATA i-Memory Flash Drive, you will need to download the ADATA i-Memory mobile app. With their app, you can access not only your iDevice’s internal storage but the i-Memory Flash Drive too. The options you have are:

Photo:

You can access photos off the flash drive. They load up in pretty little square thumbnails or listed out with a bit more detail.

Music:

You can play music from within the app itself. I found that there were a couple if issues. First off, the Music portion of the app did not seem smart enough to read multiple folders. I had to place all my music I wanted into a single folder. Secondly, when you play a song, it stores it temporarily on the iDevice itself! At least that’s what it looked like it did when iOS started to complain I was out of internal storage.

Video:

You can upload videos and movies to the ADATA i-Memory Flash Drive UE710 and play them from your i-Device. It took me a little bit extra time, but I managed to figure out how to move videos from my iPhone and copy them over to the i-Memory Flash Drive. The process seems to be one extra step from what you can do with a photo. It is not entirely user intuitive.

Document:

Similar to the other categories, you can store documents too. It’s easy to make a backup of your contacts (such as those on your phone) and then it will display them as if you were looking at them in the Contacts app under iOS. This is a good way to keep backups of your contact list or share them to another phone.

File Manager:

File Manager allows you to look at all the files you have on your phone, from images, to contact backups, to music. Essentially it looks like a ‘catch-all’ option instead of selecting one of the above categories.

Performance as a USB Drive

So how does the ADATA i-Memory Flash Drive UE710 perform as just a USB 3.0 flash drive?

In HD Tune, the UE710 achieved an average transfer speed of 64.4 MB/s over USB 3.0. The default sequential test in CrystalDiskMark yielded read and write speeds of 75.11MB/s and 27.08 MB/s, respectively.

Since we on the topic of Lightning connectors and Apple products, then it would probably best to see how the data transfer speeds are on an actual Mac computer too. The Mac used is a 2011 13-inch Macbook Air. This particular model does not have USB 3.0 ports, but is connected to a Belkin Thunderbolt 2 Express Dock HD that does have USB 3.0 ports accessed over the Thunderbolt port. This means there is a bit of a performance hit as the data is traversing over different interfaces.

The overall read and write performance of the ADATA i-Memory Flash Drive UE710 averages a maximum read speed of about 80MBps when taking into account both operating systems and computers; the write speeds are very similar as well. I wouldn’t go about editing photos or videos live with the UE710, but for the most part, listening to music or storing digital files and moving them between a phone and computer would work well.

Final Thoughts on the ADATA UE710

It is a welcome change to have an Apple iPhone 6 Plus go from 16GB to over 128GB with the addition of the ADATA i-Memory Flash Drive UE710. The major hit against would be the need to remove the case from the phone in order to use it. The size of the UE710 is also nice as it can easily fit any sized pocket conveniently. Being able to transfer files over Lightning and USB 3.0 is great, but it would be extra good if ADATA bundled some sort of Lightning extension cable so one could still make use of it while a case was on the phone.

I noticed that while using the UE710 and playing music, the music would transfer over to the iPhone temporarily. This actually resulted in me seeing the “Out of Storage Space” error message I see frequently. Luckily I can clear out the i-Memory App cache so that it frees up some extra space. I also did not enjoy the Music portion of the i-Memory App. It isn’t “smart” enough to scour multiple directories for songs. I had to move all my songs out of their respective artist/album directories into one single root directory. This makes organization a nightmare, but at least I could then play all my music properly. I’ve opted to just use the USB 3.0 connector to my car to play music as opposed to going through my iPhone 6 and Bluetooth.

The rest of the i-Memory App worked as expected and was fairly straight-forward in use. A nice touch is the ability to export and import your phone contacts easily.

Overall the ADATA i-Memory Flash Drive UE710 is a nice little storage drive that will help increase your Apple mobile product’s internal storage, though with a bit of an inconvenience. If you don’t make use of a phone case or an iPad case, then it will work nicely. If you plan on just using it as a 128 GB USB 3.0 flash drive, then it will also work nicely. I’m glad I can actually use it for playing music in the car.

The ADATA UE710 is available now in 32GB, 64GB and 128GB capacities with prices starting around $45 online.