Question What are your favorite USB flash drives?

mindless1

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Aug 11, 2001
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TLDR; Just ignore this topic if you're not looking for or can contribute to the value leaders for modern USB flash drives. I have seen the same reviews anyone can pull up with a google search and they are lacking, to say the least.

SO, I got this Teamgroup C145, 128GB USB flash drive in the mail today for $11. I didn't expect much, love the GB:$ ratio, but it's poorly made (structurally weak) and slow, averaging about 16.5MB/s write speed.

I could go into detail about structurally weak but let's say I thought it felt very light, very thin plastic including the casing seams moving when I squeezed it, so not wanting to wonder about using it, I popped it open and saw a pretty fragile construction, then filled it with epoxy to eliminate the weakness so now it is extremely rugged. I do not want to bother doing this!

SO, what are your favorite lowest cost flash drives that are very sturdy, but more importantly, which current models do you deem worth the price increase for higher performance. I'll share a few observations I made, without owning some of these.

- Sandisk Ultra Fit and Ultra Flair, (and probably Loop, Luxe, Extreme Go, and others) are prone to overheating and slow down to sub-15MB/s on extended writes. Some people even have them stutter, and lockup from heat. Build quality is high, they're very sturdy.

- Samsung Bar Plus, this would be the only flash drive I ever buy if it were more than double the speed, has heat issues and slows down similar to, but not as bad as the Sandisk Ultras.


- Transcend Jetflash 910, seems to have performance rivaling a Sandisk Extreme Pro but at lower cost. I do have a Sandisk Extreme Pro and have no regrets buying it years ago but they are pricey, now over 4X the cost per GB in some sizes. Both of these are reasonably well built.

- Arcanite AK58, seems a pretty reasonable performance:price ratio. I don't have one of these, have no idea about build quality.

- Vansuny, ?? Seems like a generic is trying to make it into the big leagues unless the specs are just a lie. I have never bought *this* generic a flash drive before. https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B08LGKDG1J

- Patriot Supersonic Rage 2 or Rage Elite (same thing internally?) used to be a value:performance leader but their prices did not drop with the last flash density increase like everyone else so they are more of a yesterday's choice. They are fairly sturdy.

- Corsair Voyager GTX, costs so much that it is a bit of a joke. No USB3 flash drive should cost over twice what the same capacity and higher performance SSD costs. I accept the rationale that performance at a small size is worth something but when it costs no more to make it, that is a hard pill to swallow. They are fairly sturdy.

- PNY Pro Elite, looks sturdy, specs (and benchmarks) look similar to the Patriot Supersonics and at simliar price points.


Have you found a hidden gem, a flash drive that performs beyond its pay grade and is sturdy? Please do not just tell me some benchmark score that involves the OS caching, any performance metric should be long enough (writes) that the cache is exhausted. For example if you write 40GB to it, what is the average speed at the end? Crystal diskmark, etc benchmark tools mean nothing to me compared to real world file performance with large sequential file reads and writes.
 
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damian101

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I almost completely switched to using microSD cards. I had too many bad experiences with USB flash drives that looked good on paper but then either had abysmal write access times, write bandwidth that drops to extremely low levels after a few Gigabytes of transfer, would overheat quickly, fail quickly, and any combination of the above.
With microSD cards you can avoid the more serious performance problems by making sure to get one in the UHS-I U3 and A1/A2 performance classes. That should guarantee both at least 30MB/s sequential write speed and decent access times at all times.
MicroSD cards also seem to be normally better value, and they are easy to store with a product like this one: https://www.amazon.de/gp/aw/d/B07SZ...LIX8WCQN7A&psc=1#immersive-view_1606107070412
I use the Kingston MobileLite Duo 3C Reader. Can recommend.
 

Jimminy

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May 19, 2020
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For speed, I use an SSD in a USB enclosure. When you need 128 GB or more, the cost may be reasonable. The only problem is I can't figure a way to get windows to execute a trim operation ... it thinks they are hard drives.
 
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mindless1

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Thanks but this is the opposite of my intention, to have a self contained USB flash drive. Obviously I do have SSDs, SD and mSD cards, enclosures, etc. This is about USB3 flash drives only.
 

mindless1

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With microSD cards you can avoid the more serious performance problems by making sure to get one in the UHS-I U3 and A1/A2 performance classes. That should guarantee both at least 30MB/s sequential write speed and decent access times at all times.

I'm looking for some that are significantly faster than 30MB/s sequential write speed. Maybe I should have asked a different queston, like what are the alternatives that come closest to the performance of a Sandisk Extreme Pro at same or smaller size and lower cost per GB? I listed a few but a good half of those are significantly slower.
 

Insert_Nickname

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May 6, 2012
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I'm looking for some that are significantly faster than 30MB/s sequential write speed.

Flash drives today are mostly designed to be as cheap as possible. The high performance market has moved to external SSDs.

If you need >128GB you really should consider an external SSD, due to the time it takes to fill up the drive. You don't need to compromise too much on the Flash Drive form factor with something like this:

(needs an M.2 drive)
https://www.raidsonic.de/products/e...cases_m2_m_sata/index_en.php?we_objectID=5839

Regular 2.5" SATA SSDs are dirt cheap right now. If you can live with the cables, an external case + a budget SSD can be a really economical solution compared to a high performance flash drive.
 

mindless1

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Please stay on topic. I'm not asking what you prefer instead.

I quite specifically want USB flash drives, and they aren't all designed to be cheap as possible and slow. The issue is weeding through them when synthetic benchmarks often do not mirror real world performance.

As already stated, I have other memory devices and they have their place, but so does a sturdy, faster (than average), USB flash drive. They all exist for their own purpose.
 
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SamMaster

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Jun 26, 2010
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I daily drive a Sandisk Ultra Flair (64GB) for work. It gets warm yes, but I never noticed any slowdowns. Even with big files or apps to install, speed stays consistent.
 

mindless1

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^ Ultra Flair (128GB) is one I have, mine does slow down after a minute or so heating up from extended writes, below 15MB/s. This experience is mirrored by many reviews I've seen of it and the other similar small metal shelled Sandisks. It's not a system/host fault, same scenario using Sandisk Extreme Pro has no slowdowns, does over 100MB/s.

I do like the Ultra Flair design (besides the weak plastic keyring loop), but would accept a larger casing size with the expectation that anything getting performance numbers up where I want them, is going to need more flash chips for paralleled lanes to get there.

This essentially makes it a USB/SSD hybrid, in a smaller size (than traditional form factor SSDs) that is (potentially) more durable and avoids needing a cable. A Sandisk Extreme Pro is one example, now what are contenders at a lower cost per GB? It does not need to be retractable, probably even better if it isn't.
 
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mindless1

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So far I've only mentioned sequential write numbers but mixed write performance is important too. I'm testing that Teamgroup C145 right now and it took almost an hour and a half to write 26GB (not all small files either), avg 5.3MB/s.

This is no faster than a USB2 flash drive (Patriot Xporter XT Boost) that I paid $17 for, a decade ago. At least the cost/GB is 24X lower.
 
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mindless1

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^ Lacking any feedback from anyone else on what their experiences are with the higher performing tier of USB flash drives, you may be right, though some like the Transcend 910 look like a good alternative, considering you can get those in 256GB for $49 while the Sandisk Extreme Pro is $44 for 128GB.
 
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mindless1

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^ Heh, you know you can leave everything off their links after the B07NLZFH4V, right? !@#$ Amazon uses those to track people.

Yeah, the Rage Elite is not bad, an upper-mid performer but it drops pretty low on mixed writes and usually costs more than others with similar performance, EXCEPT right now it appears be on sale, $33 for the 256GB is a good price for that!
 
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VirtualLarry

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Flash drives today are mostly designed to be as cheap as possible. The high performance market has moved to external SSDs.
If you need >128GB you really should consider an external SSD, due to the time it takes to fill up the drive.
This!

For cheap boot-drive USB3.x drives, I have preferred the Yellow/Black Adata UV128 16/32GB-sized drives. You can write on the back-side with a sharpie, and they are reasonably-fast for their capacity. Plus, Newegg has them cheap in like a 3x or 5x combo deal, nearly at least once a month.

 

EXCellR8

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The only scenarios where I need flash drives for nowadays are for booting Windows (when I can't use a deploy server) or for BitLocker decryption keys when a TPM is not present.

Other than that... I don't really use them and don't need anything over 8GB
 

mindless1

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Guess it depends on what you're doing with them. USB flash drives have worked very well for me to provide a durable, most compatible and transportable medium, and forget about merely booting windows, I can boot and run an app to restore the windows OS partition from one, in a durable device that allows me to have a backup on a keychain.

Yes an SSD is faster, but sometimes it is not the fastest that wins the race, rather the one that is durable enough to survive but still fast enough that it doesn't leave you wishing you spent more time on getting something with more performance.

I have no use for sub-128GB flash drives, already have plenty of those. I mean, I do have uses for them, and use them for those uses, but this is tomorrow not yesterday, so why are we even wondering if higher capacity and performance is the right way to go?

It is all very strange to me that USB flash drives are treated differently than other computing performance metrics. I could understand it if we were talking about whether you need a high end video card or CPU at $100's of dollars difference but here it's more like the cost of a couple lunches.
 
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mindless1

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I monitored Amazon prices for a while, never really saw enough of a discount on any I was considering, to make the leap then saw one of these as a warehouse special for $28 so jumped on that:


A few reviews state it's only 128GB instead of the 256GB listed, but initially they were set up with half the capacity hidden as a secure encrypted partition, which their software can change (% allocated to that or get rid of it), or later shipments make the whole capacity available w/o doing anything.

Downside is it is using an old design with MLC chips, so the longer signal traces will cause a little performance hit compared to newer 3D MLC but should still be up in the performance tier I was looking for, and spreading out the chips for lower thermal density could make for more stability and longer lifespan... used to be, I never wore out flash drive or had stability issues, but some of the modern high density TLC flash based cheapies, tend to run hot and throttle back, in addition to fewer write cycles.

It's a shame there aren't more USB flash drive teardowns out there, as I'd really like to see build quality, controller and flash configurations in order to weed through who is offering more value for the money, vs same thing in a different shell.
 
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MalVeauX

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Dec 19, 2008
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Heya,

For a long time, my go to was the Patriot Super Sonic Rage 2. 128Gb. Inexpensive, fast.

However, now, flash drives are just not doing the job if you need capacity and speed. SSD/NAND has really taken that and its quite affordable for much higher capacity. You can get 500Gb SSD/NAND all day for sub-hundred cost.

The Samsung T7 is not the fastest and definitely performs best on a USB3.1 or newer platform and is USB C type connection. But it's commonly $70 roughly, faster than most flash sticks, way higher capacity, and it's still small with no moving parts and you can put it in a case that makes it no bigger than a credit card. I've been using one a while now and I get sustained 220Mb/s transfer on my AM4 platform forms, consistent with max USB3 type speeds give or take. It's not reviewed well, because of its speed relative to the 3.2 interface stuff. But for sub-hundred, it's good. The T5 is faster for most, but can't hardly find it these days other than 1TB.

I think overall take a look at the 500Gb to 1TB SSD/NAND options now. They're going to easily replace the "thumb drive" of our past. The size difference is irrelevant in my opinion because if it goes in your pocket, it goes in your pocket. And no one carries a costly stick on a key chain banging around with keys. You get more performance, way more capacity, and you can essentially still get water proof, drop proof stuff, sub-hundred cost, in SSD/NAND.

Very best,
 
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mindless1

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^ Thank you for making 5% of your post on-topic before going off-topic. ;)

As for the rest, couldn't disagree more. The size difference matters as does not having a kludge of a solution where you need a cable for it. Depends on what you're using it for.

Granted, the one I just bought is on the large side for a USB flash drive, but I already have a smaller one on my keychain that I EDC, as well as smaller ones plugged into vehicles, router, boombox. USB flash drives have their niche.
 
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Feb 25, 2011
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I just buy the ones in the checkout line at MicroCenter, so if I had to pick a "favorite" it'd be them.

They're dirt-cheap and usually perform pretty well. (~100MB/sec reads, ~30MB/sec writes, better-than-spinning-hard-drive random performance.) I messed around with RAIDing a bunch together once for fun, but all I can say is that it worked.
 

mindless1

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^ Yeah I was eyeing those on Amazon, good $:capacity ratio, and it's hard to equate Amazon review benchmarks due to system differences but they look about the same performance as the Teamgroup C145, much slower than 30MB/s on small writes.

That would work for some uses like one vehicle, but a little long for some other uses and more than a little slow for some others.... not suggesting they don't have good uses, just that I already have some that fill the roles they're good for.