We considered traditional stick flash drives, flash drives with retractable heads, and smaller, thumbnail-sized drives. The flash drive should also be durable enough to toss into a bag without breaking. Size and build quality: Flash drives should easily fit into a USB port without worry of breaking the drive or the port.But our USB-C pick is still reasonably fast and doesn’t require an additional dongle to use with modern MacBooks or other notebooks that primarily feature USB-C ports. If speed is your number-one concern, you can use a faster USB-A drive with a USB-C–to–USB-A adapter. Connection type: Our pick for this guide is a USB-A drive that is a good deal faster than our USB-C pick.As in previous years and previous versions of this guide, read speeds were uniformly fast on all of our picks.

We’re still waiting for a USB flash drive that supports USB 3.1 Gen 2. File transfer speeds with our picks won’t match many SSDs, but our picks should perform as well or better than any platter-based hard drive.

Drive speed: We’ve made write speeds an even bigger consideration this time around-a twofold increase in transfer speed can lead to a practical difference of 15 to 30 minutes of saved time with large folders of variable file sizes.

This amount gives most users plenty of room to store big and small files without having to constantly delete them. Based on this research, we settled on a sweet spot of 128 GB of storage, which as of publication offered the best intersection of price, performance, and reliability based on user feedback and reviews at popular retailers. Capacity: The price of flash storage in thumb drives has dropped quite a bit since we last updated this guide, and our testing and research has revealed that the performance of many models varies depending on the amount of storage included.Spending more gets more than 128 GB of storage, hardware encryption, or somewhat more durable cases, but more expensive drives don’t really add anything to everyday uses. Price: Most people shouldn’t pay more than around $45 for a USB flash drive.

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