Best USB Flash Drives and External SSDs

A parallel thread made me look at the interesting 'best' selections below. My goodness, less than half of my stuff is at USB 3.1 speed and frankly, I don't feel the need for any more speed. YMMV

I can vouch for one of those USB sticks... I have this one, and it's as fast as advertised...

Amazon.com

All my external drives (NvME or SSD) are in an enclosure or USB3 to SATA cable. Don't buy the 'prebuilt' ones.

Haydon said:

A parallel thread made me look at the interesting 'best' selections below. My goodness, less than half of my stuff is at USB 3.1 speed and frankly, I don't feel the need for any more speed. YMMV

The Best USB Flash Drives for 2022

Share your files with your colleagues, bring them on a plane, or even take them underwater with these top USB flash drives, the perfect way to store and back up presentations, photos, and more.

www.pcmag.com

The Best External SSDs for 2023

Dump that poky portable hard drive! External solid-state drives are faster and more affordable than ever. Check out our top-rated SSDs, plus detailed advice on how to buy the right one for you.

www.pcmag.com

Click to expand...

If you are after speed, nothing beats NVMe SSD.

Fabler2 said:

All my external drives (NvME or SSD) are in an enclosure or USB3 to SATA cable. Don't buy the 'prebuilt' ones.

Click to expand...

Agreed -- pre-built ones just charge more -- and decent even USB3 connection is certainly fast enough when using SSD/NVME external devices.

Cheers
jimbo

i have an 8TB spinning WD drive that i use for holding my Macrium backups.


I recently built a 1TB External SSD in a 10Gbps external enclousure for about $100, that is super fast as an external drive. About 1,000MB/s on transfers.

For SSD's I use Samsung 970 Plus I have 3 of them, one in an enclosure as an external drive.
For Flash drives I always use SanDisk Ultra Flair, I have about ten of those

I bought these almost four years and a half ago at 100 Euros each... they're still going strong.

That is good, how long has usb 3.0 been around? my oldest one is usb 2

The-Hive said:

That is good, how long has usb 3.0 been around? my oldest one is usb 2

Click to expand...

USB 3.0 was released in November 2008, so it's pretty old by now. But for a lot of common tasks IMO it is still fast enough, and, most laptops that are new these days only have one USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type C port so, for laptop users USB 3.0 (aka "USB 3.1 Gen 1", aka "USB 3.2 Gen 1×1"─the naming is different, but it's still the same exact thing) is not yet completely obsolete.

Other factors to consider are that these USB flash drives are noticeably more compact when compared to even the smallest of external M.2 NVMe enclosures, and, if the USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type C port is Gen 2×1, then it will limit the speed of the NVMe SSD to 1000MB/s whereas the cheaper M.2 NVMe SSDs typically are capable of 1800-2000MB/s. Potentially it matters when the price gap between these cheaper NVMe SSDs and other M.2 NVMe SSDs that typically are capable of 3400-3500MB/s often tends to be actually rather small, even though it can also be argued that a decent quality external USB 3.2 Gen 2×1 Type C enclosure that is capable of 1000MB/s is now relatively inexpensive.

At least for now, I have buried the idea of getting an external M.2 NVMe enclosure. I just felt that the money was better spent toward replacing my laptop's 512GB internal M.2. SATA SSD with a 2TB NVMe one, so that's what I finally ended up doing instead, and I also upgraded the RAM even though that wasn't really necessary.

Haydon said:

A parallel thread made me look at the interesting 'best' selections below. My goodness, less than half of my stuff is at USB 3.1 speed and frankly, I don't feel the need for any more speed. YMMV

The Best USB Flash Drives for 2022

Share your files with your colleagues, bring them on a plane, or even take them underwater with these top USB flash drives, the perfect way to store and back up presentations, photos, and more.

www.pcmag.com

The Best External SSDs for 2023

Dump that poky portable hard drive! External solid-state drives are faster and more affordable than ever. Check out our top-rated SSDs, plus detailed advice on how to buy the right one for you.

www.pcmag.com

Click to expand...

USB 3.1 is the fastest my new desktop will do.

I'm starting to replace all my flash drives with small NVMe enclosures. Right now, it seems that the enclosures built upon the RealTek RTL9210 chip are very highly rated. They draw less power and support both NVMe and SATA M.2 SSDs. I just purchased one for about $23. Some of these are really small although admittedly a bit bigger than a flash drive. But you can add a 500 GB SSD for under $50 and a 1TB SSD for well under $100 these days. My total cost for enclosure and 1TB NVMe was about $101.

Some of these enclosures are also completely tool free like the one I link to below.

Can't beat the performance and the price is really great.

@hdmi Thanks for the info, the majority of mine are usb3.2 gen 2 a couple are older

And with the external NVMe enclosures, it's not necessary to have the expensive/fastest drives...as it's the USB transfer speeds that are going to be your limiting factor. A PCIE Gen 3 drive that runs much cooler is a better NVMe for an enclosure than a PCIe Gen 4.

pparks1 said:

And with the external NVMe enclosures, it's not necessary to have the expensive/fastest drives...as it's the USB transfer speeds that are going to be your limiting factor. A PCIE Gen 3 drive that runs much cooler is a better NVMe for an enclosure than a PCIe Gen 4.

Click to expand...

Excellent point. I put an inexpensive $77 1TB NVMe in my enclosure for that very reason, but it still runs like a scalded dog for a USB device.

Man, my biggest flash drive is a whopping 32gb . I do have one that says it's 128 but I don't really trust it. For brands I like SanDisk and Silicon Power. My external drives are all HDD's. I don't care that much about speed. Reliability is what counts. I still use some 2.0 USB sticks.

Anyone has one of these? I like it that it is flat, good for storing in a binder, along with my notes. I don't like it that only the read speed is specified, but not the write speed.

Edit: Found it, 100MB/s read, 15MB/s write. Whoah, write is almost 7 times slower than read, what causes this big difference?

hdmi said:

At least for now, I have buried the idea of getting an external M.2 NVMe enclosure. I just felt that the money was better spent toward replacing my laptop's 512GB internal M.2. SATA SSD with a 2TB NVMe one, so that's what I finally ended up doing instead, and I also upgraded the RAM even though that wasn't really necessary.

Click to expand...

Although a bit off-topic here, but my advice to potential buyers or upgraders of laptop: wait for arrival of the last 12 gen Intel CPU (Alder Lake), production of mobile CPUs will start in February and laptops are expected in March with Windows 11 pre-installed. It will be a significant step forward comparing even with current 11 gen Intel CPU, so you will be able to decide whether to upgrade current laptop or buy a new one.

About the subject: about a year ago Samsung SSD T5 was among the leaders (I have a couple of them), but now it is dethroned by more modern and better devices. For example, rugged SanDisk looks very attractive from the points of spec and price.

Ghot said:

I can vouch for one of those USB sticks... I have this one, and it's as fast as advertised...

Amazon.com


View attachment 18597


View attachment 18598

Click to expand...

SIW2 said:

Check out this Amazon review of Corsair 128 GB Voyager GTX USB 3.1 Premium Flash Drive, Black

Voyager GTX 3.1 write speed drops quickly

www.amazon.co.uk

Click to expand...

A lot depends on what the "file" you're copying, consists of, and what size it is.
I get the full speed for about 7-8GB then it drops.
Fortunately... I don't have hardly anything that large.

To make a Macrium backup (38GB on C:\ ), from SSD to WD Black HDD takes 2:32.
From SSD to USB stick 4:00
Resulting backup size ~19GB

Biggest file on my comp (other than a full OS image), is the game Tower of Time 5.76GB (pre-install)