I lost my flash drive and need a new one. Transfer speeds don’t matter too much. I will mainly use it to create bootable media and to transfer a few files between computers and/or phones (no cloud storage for me).
Now I’m questioning whether I should get the cheapest drive I can find or if there really is a difference in quality between €8 and €30. What experience did you make?
There are definitely differences between thumbdrives.
First of all, on Amazon, ebay and the like there are flat out fake drives. You can recognize those by the extremely high capacity and low price. They will pretend to have high capacity, but then they’ll just throw away your data. To test if you’ve fallen victim to one of these, copy a very big file (e.g. a movie) onto the drive, remove the drive, reinsert it, and then try to use the file. If that doesn’t work, your drive was fake. Amazon will refund you of that happens, I dont know about ebay and others.
Any name brand will be good enough quality for home use. If you intend to use the drive for backups, spend a bit extra. If you intend to use the drive for just moving files around, feel free to cheap out.
Some drives offer extra security features such as fingerprint scanners. Those are not worth your money.
Extra rugged drives may be worth it to you, but if you’re careful, you won’t need that. I have not found waterproof drives to have extra value, but that depends a lot on how you’ll treat the drive.
In general, you can’t go wrong with SanDisk of Kingston. There are several other good brands, but I don’t want to make this list too long.
I like Gorilla Drives because they are waterproof and can even survive being ran over by trucks etc. 🦍 Also temperature safe from freezing and melting-ish.
Also you should definitely checkout Ventoy.
Can have multiple ISOs for Linux distros or eck 🪟 s. Toss in some recovery tools or images like clonezilla/rescuezilla.
Leftover space is still USB mass storage. Can drag and drop files etc.
I’m simply a fan of their literall durability/resistance.
Are there faster drives? Perhaps.
But I like the security of mine working fine even in the event my pocket gets super sweaty or if I accidentally leave my keychain in direct sunlight on a summer day.
Or in my pocket when it’s 32°F outside at winter time when I’m shoveling etc.
At the same time I’ve never had a flashdrive fail due to temperature or water. I used to do printer repair for a fairly large company and on the printers I worked on firmware was loaded just by plugging a flashdrive into the usb port on the printer. I always had a pocket full of flashdrives because of that. Over the years I’ve probably forgotten at least a dozen flashdrives in my pocket when I washed my pants and at least half of those wound up going through the dryer too. They were all still completely functional afterwords. I also live in MN so I’ve left them in my vehicle when it’s -17F outside and had no issues.
The only things I’ve ever actually seen kill a flashdrive are major physical damage like you said, or just general wear from plugging them in and unplugging them too much. Technically I guess I also killed one by messing up a format badly enough but that’s a whole other issue. As far as physical durability goes the full metal body Kingston Data Traveler drives have always been durable enough that I could just shove them in my pocket and not worry about them. I’m sure there are others like those but those are just what my workplace bought in bulk so they are what I typically used.
Thanks for mentioning Ventoy, even if it’s technically off-topic :)
Not OP but didn’t know about Ventoy. It looks really useful. Thanks.
Definitely no expert on USB drives, but I do not belive that there is much regulation around USB drives, and I’ve purchased drives that claim to have super large capacities only to discover they actually don’t. There are methods of having the USB report a larger capacity to the OS than actually exists on the drive. Whether or not that’s still the case I don’t know but it’s something to be aware of
I’d aim for mid range if I were you. Not too cheap, but not too expensive.
There was one youtube I followed who compared a few he had. He found some would report a good bit less storage than advertised, while others were pretty close.
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