Anyone have information about SLC USB Flash Drives?

[DarkRogue]

Hello,

More than general information, I'm looking more specifically at maybe a list of some sort. I've in the market to look for a new USB drive, since my old 1GB one is getting a bit too small. I'm thinking of retasking it to small office-type duty to transfer documents back and forth. I'm thinking of getting a bigger one for beefier data transferring.

That brings me to look for SLC-based drives, as transferring gigs of data with the slower MLC drives I believe may be excruciating. It's to my understanding, however, that SLC is largely discontinued now due to its high cost. I tried to find an old/used Corsair Voyager GT 8GB but no one wants to let go of theirs lol. I have no idea what other USB flash drives use SLC and are as fast as that drive. 8GB I think was the max as far as capacity went for SLC, so I'm looking in that range, maybe 4GB if I must, but definitely prefer 8GB.

So, who knows of 4-8GB SLC-based USB flash drives?

 

[DarkRogue]

lol, I suppose not..

 

[zephyrprime]

I think you're right about slc flash drives being discontinued. However, even the mlc drives should be pretty fast. Why not just go by transfer speeds and customer reviews?

 

[DarkRogue]

Well, MLC I believe would be fine for most light-weight applications, but I'm thinking that the slow write speed will be a major bottleneck especially when you transfer several GB of data at once. To compound the problem, I believe transferring several GB of small/medium sized files (such as copying pictures back and forth) would be much slower on everything than copying the same size in one file. This is partly the reason I'm looking at SLC to alleviate this problem. For a small USB drive for office work, Any small MLC drive would be fine though.

Are there any MLC drives that approach the speed of an SLC in terms of read/write performance though?
Also, IIRC SLC's are much more robust than MLC's - they get upwards of 100,000 writes vs 10,000 writes I think.

 

[ss284]

As far as I know, the performance MLC based flash drives out right now are about as fast as the discontinued SLC drives. As for robustness, 10,000 is more than enough for your application Assuming you transferred data twice a day, to and from work, you would have more than 12 years of life on the drive.

 

[VirtualLarry]

I have some small 128KB drives that benchmark at 8MB/sec, would that indicate that they are SLC? They are fairly old. The problem is, even though they have the speed, it doesn't really matter because of the small capacity.

 

[DarkRogue]

128KB, wow that is tiny lol. I suppose that was around when these things just came out.
Anyway, that's my biggest point - with smaller capacities, slower speed is less noticeable, but once you get to the larger sized drives, the slow speed will become more apparent when you try to place increasingly larger files into it.

As for the robustness, I'm sure 10,000 is fine for most uses, but my usage will be incredibly random, so I want to be able to have a reliable drive ready whenever I need it.
I'd like to try to find a place that has a bunch of these things listed, but I can't seem to find a reliable listing of USB flash drive reviews. If there indeed is an MLC drive that reaches the read/write speeds (especially write) of SLC drives, then I may be willing to go for that instead. Where do you guys go for these reviews? Or do the majority of you simply grab whichever is cheap and deal with the consequences later?