Every year, USB flash drives get cheaper and hold more data. Unfortunately, they don’t always get faster. The reality is, many USB 3.0 flash drives aren’t noticeably faster than their U…
I’ll bite. I bought a bunch of these and I use them regularly and I’m getting frustrated with the wait times. Seeing this post makes me feel like I’ve got the worst of the worst which is motivating me to consider opening my wallet and moving on. Anyone have recommendations for a cheap, reliable usb drive I can buy in bulk (like 5 to start) in the 64-128gb ballpark that might not break records, but isn’t embarrassingly slow? I’m really partial to the double sided drives that have a USB c option as well, but those are still a little hard to find while meeting the other requirements I’ve listed.
I got a Sandisk Ultra Dual Drive Go 128GB for ~$15. It’s fast, small, inexpensive, and does both USB-C and USB-A. Sandisk is one of the best when it comes to reliability, but I’ve only had it for a couple weeks (bought to replace a cheap POS), so I guess we’ll see how it holds up.
I got it because the noname brand I bought before wouldn’t work for installing Linux, and it was really slow and took an hour to flash a 16GB ISO. The Sandisk is a lot faster, flashing the same ISO in a couple min (something like 100+ MB/s sustained IIRC).
My main complaint is that it’s plastic, so the housing will probably break if I use the keychain option, but there’s a more expensive metal line (Luxe) that would probably suit that use case if you need.
They seem to be pretty widely available, I picked mine up at Best Buy because I needed it same-day.
Edit: one minor downside is the drive does get a bit hot when doing lots of reads or writes. So if you’re constantly reading and writing a ton of data, you could run into longevity issues if the temps stay high.
I had a 1 TB one I used for the longest time. My only complaint is that it never played well with any of my Linux devices (Steam Deck randomly decided it was done reading it and I had to unplug it and my Bazzite device just locks up)
I’ll bite. I bought a bunch of these and I use them regularly and I’m getting frustrated with the wait times. Seeing this post makes me feel like I’ve got the worst of the worst which is motivating me to consider opening my wallet and moving on. Anyone have recommendations for a cheap, reliable usb drive I can buy in bulk (like 5 to start) in the 64-128gb ballpark that might not break records, but isn’t embarrassingly slow? I’m really partial to the double sided drives that have a USB c option as well, but those are still a little hard to find while meeting the other requirements I’ve listed.
I got a Sandisk Ultra Dual Drive Go 128GB for ~$15. It’s fast, small, inexpensive, and does both USB-C and USB-A. Sandisk is one of the best when it comes to reliability, but I’ve only had it for a couple weeks (bought to replace a cheap POS), so I guess we’ll see how it holds up.
I got it because the noname brand I bought before wouldn’t work for installing Linux, and it was really slow and took an hour to flash a 16GB ISO. The Sandisk is a lot faster, flashing the same ISO in a couple min (something like 100+ MB/s sustained IIRC).
My main complaint is that it’s plastic, so the housing will probably break if I use the keychain option, but there’s a more expensive metal line (Luxe) that would probably suit that use case if you need.
They seem to be pretty widely available, I picked mine up at Best Buy because I needed it same-day.
Edit: one minor downside is the drive does get a bit hot when doing lots of reads or writes. So if you’re constantly reading and writing a ton of data, you could run into longevity issues if the temps stay high.
Not flashdrive cheap, but I just use cheap 256gb sata M.2 drives and a tool less enclosure.
Runs at sata speeds and are cheap. Plus the enclosure supports NVMe so I could run around with a 8TB stick.
I had a 1 TB one I used for the longest time. My only complaint is that it never played well with any of my Linux devices (Steam Deck randomly decided it was done reading it and I had to unplug it and my Bazzite device just locks up)