The USB flash drive alternative
There are good reasons for choosing a USB flash drive, but speed certainly isn’t one of them
If you can expand your storage by attaching an SSD to your USB port, why not use a pocket-sized flash drive instead? After all, they use the same connection – indeed, some drives have convenient double-ended designs that fit both USB-A and USB-C sockets, or a Lightning connection for iPhones and iPads. They’re also smaller and more self-contained than most external SSDs, and the prices are competitive too.
Invariably, though, flash drives are comparatively slow. SSDs use faster memory chips and more powerful controllers, capable of handling massively parallel I/O. If you tried to build a flash drive like that it would be bulky, hot and expensive.
So what can you expect from a flash drive? We used the AS SSD benchmark to test two of the latest models from SanDisk, along with the Kioxia TransMemory U301 thumb drive. The results are below, along with scores from two of our favourite external drives found in this group test for comparison.
The figures speak for themselves. Flash drives might cope better than mechanical media with some random-access operations, but overall performance is nowhere near SSD levels – especially for writing. On a pergigabyte basis, they’re much worse value too.
So are we saying that you should never buy a USB flash drive? No, not at all. If you need to store or share a modest amount of data, a flash drive is a beautifully simple solution with a low cost of entry. For ongoing storage, on the other hand, an external SSD wins out on every metric.