Don't be fooled by price — How to buy a quality USB flash drive

If you need to quickly transfer files from one computer to another or transfer data between your phone and PC without the cloud, a USB drive is the most convenient way to go. However, cheap USB flash drives can often be more trouble than they're worth.

PCWorld takes a look at the key things to consider when choosing a USB flash drive.

How do different Flash Drives differ from one another?

USB flash drives and external SSDs are both based on flash memory, but the quality of the chips can vary widely. The best chips are usually used in SSDs, medium-quality chips are used in memory cards, and the cheapest and "discarded" chips are often used in USB flash drives. Therefore, you should not consider any flash drive as a reliable option for long-term storage of important data.

Recently, data recovery companies have noticed an increase in the number of low-cost flash drives with questionable chips and misstated storage capacities. Some manufacturers even erase the original logo on the flash chip to hide the fact that it is a secondary or damaged chip.

What are the capacities of flash drives?

Typical "brand name" flash drives have capacities ranging from 64GB to 512GB. If you see a 2TB offer at a suspiciously low price, it's almost certainly a fake. Often, such a "terabyte" drive turns out to be a regular 32GB or 64GB flash drive, with the rest of the memory only on the label.

Very large flash drives sometimes come with a full-fledged controller, like SSDs. However, they are much more expensive and are really more like external SSDs than regular flash drives.

How speed depends on the USB standard

There are several generations of flash drives, and they all have different bandwidths, which determine the speed of data writing:

• USB 2.0 is very slow, with read speeds of up to 45 MB/s on average, and write speeds are even slower.
• USB 3.2 Gen1 (formerly USB 3.0) can provide up to 450 MB/s when reading, but in reality this rarely happens.
• USB 3.2 Gen2 (formerly USB 3.1) is the most popular high-speed option with a bandwidth of up to 10 Gbps. Theoretically, read speeds can reach 1000 MB/s, and write speeds can be slightly less.

At the same time, even a USB-C flash drive does not always guarantee high speed. Some models only support USB 3.2 Gen1 through the Type-A connector, while Type-C can operate at USB 2.0 levels.

Is it true that the more memory you have, the faster it is?

High read and write speeds are usually provided by controllers that access multiple chips in parallel. Larger-capacity flash drives usually have more chips, so the controller can divide the information among them. However, inexpensive models sometimes don't have such controllers, and the speed is still limited.

We also wrote that modern TVs have turned into real multimedia centers. Almost all of them are equipped with USB ports to which you can connect a flash drive with movies or even charge your phone.

As a reminder, Samsung has officially discontinued software support for the Galaxy S20 series. Its release in 2020 had a significant impact on the company's technological development.