Which Flash Drive Would You Buy?

[aeon]

So I was looking for a fast flash drive and a couple of options were available. Which do you think you would choose?

 

[Wyote]

Which one is longer lasting, less prone to breaking etc. Go with that.
Otherwise 1TB is a no brainer.

 

[aeon]

Which one is longer lasting, less prone to breaking etc. Go with that.
Otherwise 1TB is a no brainer.

Let us assume they are equally well-built and longevity for read-write cycles is the same.

Cheers,
Ian

 

[John K]

Depends what it’s needed for. Why pay extra if you don’t need the extra capacity or a slight improvement in speed? Or you could buy two of the cheaper ones for the price of the dearer, which gives you some redundancy against accidental loss or damage if you needed it.

I’ve never needed more than 64 GB in my camera for still photography for example, but I need several TB to hold my photo archive, though the archive doesn’t need exceptionally high speed retrieval.

Now video capture and playback would be another matter entirely, as would other real time high bandwidth data capture and retrieval. An other example from the SSD world would be a sophisticated cache / buffer disk in a multi user NAS? The higher capacity and extra speed would then make the 1 TB drive look like a bargain.

 

[Roses In The Vineyard]

For low cost anything goes but for raw capacity one can diy a 4TB for around $200 give or take. Personally I go for large capacity for long term use as higher capacity drive have much better write endurance and less likely to go bad from normal use.

 

[aeon]

If I just need something to get a job done, and it won’t hamper it in any way, go cheap and cheerful.

For long term use, I want a Thunderbolt enclosure with a fan and then my choice of NVME, but that’s much more money, of course.

In the end, I snagged this for $49.

Cheers,
Ian

 

[aeon]

The performance of that chonky USB SSD stick exceeded even my jaded expectations.

I was writing operating system images to it over and over, or at least the file bundle to boot and install, and it always delivered 1GB per second.

By comparison and contrast, my old Mushkin 32GB flash drive, which has multichannel data lanes, felt sloth-like.

Of course, it would be even faster with a Thunderbolt controller, but for the purpose and price, I have zero complaints.

It’s weird to think I have been banging the SSD drum for 15 years. I’m not counting the crazy ones from the ‘80s and ‘90s that mere mortals could not afford.

A quad-bay NVME box stuffed with 4TB sticks in RAID 0 on TB is simply a joy when editing video, or any time one needs fast space for scratch or build.

Cheers,
Ian

 

[Matty]

How is the 1t not the only real option?
It would take four of the smaller ones to match the 1t on storage, at more than double the price.

 

[uuu]

If you are writing OS images, then 1 TB is way more space than you need, so the sweet spot might be a pack of 16 or 32 GB drives so that you can write a different image to each drive (instead of constantly rewriting) and then just discard them as they break (which all drives do eventually, or so I am told, although I have a flash drive from like 2008 that continues to function).

 

[Quarkmaster]

I broke down a few years ago and finally bought a Blu-Ray burner, mainly for two reasons, first they apparently have longer data duration, and B, you can store a LOT more data for a lot lower price. So I bought 25GB BRDs by the cannister, and started backing up all of my data, which came to about 50 disks. Each one was stuffed to the gills, so we can say about 1250GB, or around 1.25TB. I finally bought a 5TB external HDD some years ago, and now that one is starting to fill up.

Then again, I began storing up data back in the 1990s, so I have a lot of it. It really started getting crazy when I started making youtube videos, where each video is around 1 - 2 GB. I don't delete stuff, so some of these videos will have original video content up to 25GB or more, which has to edited down - an incredibly tedious and time-consuming process. If you make one video per week, your data storage needs can get downright dicey.

I finally created a folder on my HDD called, "Deletable" and backed-up all of my early youtube videos to BluRay. When I started running out of disk space (with two or three multi-TB drives per computer), I would delete old youtube video files, hoping that the Blu-Ray copies were still good.

I only use jump drives to transfer data between computers, since I don't allow any of my Windows computers on the internet, because they're easy to hack and very vulnerable. I only go online with my linux-based computers.

 

[Quarkmaster]

I snagged this for $49.

I snagged some of these for a bit less.

But let's face it, they're crappy at data storage.