The cheap Flash Drives (USB "Pen Drives") thread.

[manly]

It sure looks like the ones I bought. Maybe they're fakes?

They have pretty good read speeds, but the write speed is no better than my run of the mill kingstons and some other low end flash drives. About 30 MB/sec. I though that was pretty shitty for an "ultra" device.

Here is what I saw with crystal disk mark:

I'd never run CDM before but I rebooted into Windows to test my SanDisk Ultra 128GB. IIRC this device is at least several years old (if they didn't silently revise it) so it's not really going to compete with the latest speed demons.

According to the Amazon product page, its writes are 60 MB/s. YMMV I guess?

I'll also test the cheap Team Group drive to see how it compares.

Edit:
Team Group C186 128GB clocks in at 120 MB/s read, 65 MB/s write.
Samsung BAR Plus 64GB is 286 MB/s read, only 35 MB/s write.

 

[mindless1]

I think I just reached a new floor for minimum USB flash drive performance and ironically, that floor is the higher end (or built with same components, I should state) models.

Inflation caused the price of almost everything to go up, but USB flash drive prices continued to fall per capacity, besides a little increase in the last year.

The result is that for the cost of a couple of fast food lunches, the budget can buy a much, MUCH faster USB flash drive. The cost difference just doesn't seem that much to me any longer, especially with the really cheap USB flash drives using QLC memory now.

I also re-educated myself about the latest tech in USB flash drives and realized that with more modern 3D TLC NAND, and pSLC caching, you don't necessarily need multiple flash chips to reach high speeds.

Anyway long story short, I wouldn't say that any USB flash drive excites me, but I've been happy to see priceerformance ratios in current gen products like these:

Amazon.com: Silicon Power 500GB MS70 USB 3.2 Gen 2 Portable External SSD with Type C Adapter : Electronics

Buy Silicon Power 500GB MS70 USB 3.2 Gen 2 Portable External SSD with Type C Adapter: External Solid State Drives - Amazon.com ✓ FREE DELIVERY possible on eligible purchases

www.amazon.com

Amazon.com

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0C3B18PKT

Even that last link, at only $30, is much faster than the Sandisk Extreme I have. I only included that last link because even though the price per capacity isn't as good as the prior two links, it is about the cheapest it gets for very reasonable performance at the 256GB capacity it has... and honorable mention, it's nice that it has both the USB-A and USB-C connectors so you don't need an adapter.

I bought one of those ESD310C and yeah, it's much faster, and smaller than pictures made it out to seem. IMO, Sandisk Extreme has priced itself out of relevance, no good reason to buy one today unless, maybe... if you have a really, really really old system, like early win7 build or Vista or older (but then do you even have USB3?

Maybe if you tossed in a PCIe USB controller card) then the Sandisk Extreme might get better performance in that situation, but on win8 or newer, Sandisk Extreme is both slower and more expensive than other high performance options available today, before even considering an external enclosure NVME.

External NVME makes no sense to me given the performance being good enough with contemporary USB "SSD" flash drives, with the exception being that it could still be a good value to reuse an old NVME that you upgraded away from for higher capacity in a desktop system, so you have the NVME drive left over and just need to get an enclosure for it. Even then, I wouldn't want to EDC that.