USB-C flash drive recommendations?

[Lord Mirdalan]

I'm buying my first machine with USB-C, and I've seen USB drives with Type-C on one end and Type-A on the other. 

 

Do any of you have experience/recommendations in this area?

 

Thanks!

[Darren]

My workplace are huge fans of the Samsung Portable SSDs, they appear to come with two cables (A/C) so no matter what they should be good.

[Lord Mirdalan]

3 minutes ago, Darren said:

My workplace are huge fans of the Samsung Portable SSDs, they appear to come with two cables (A/C) so no matter what they should be good.

I hadn't considered an external hard drive/SSD. Something like this? https://www.samsung.com/us/computing/memory-storage/portable-solid-state-drives/portable-ssd-t7-touch-usb-3-2-1tb-black-mu-pc1t0k-ww/

[Darren]

3 minutes ago, Lord Mirdalan said:

I hadn't considered an external hard drive/SSD. Something like this? https://www.samsung.com/us/computing/memory-storage/portable-solid-state-drives/portable-ssd-t7-touch-usb-3-2-1tb-black-mu-pc1t0k-ww/

Yep, except we just get the T5s.

 

I wouldn't consider them as part of a build due to cloud storage being so cheap and prevalent, streaming services, high likelihood you'll have good storage on your machine etc but if you have a specific requirement for an external drive then those are a great choice.

[DarkEnergy]

Flash drives kind of suck, the decent fast ones are still USB type A. You can always just use an adapter like this: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B015Z7XE0A/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o01_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

[Lord Mirdalan]

1 minute ago, DarkEnergy said:

Flash drives kind of suck, the decent fast ones are still USB type A. You can always just use an adapter like this: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B015Z7XE0A/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o01_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

Why would that be better that s solution like this?

https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1417005-REG/pny_technologies_p_fd128otgsltc_ge_pny_128gb_duo_link.html/qa

 

I;m not saying you're wrong, just curious.

[Kilrah]

I've been through this and the below with a good fast microSD has proven to be the only viable solution:

 

https://www.kingston.com/en/memory-card-readers/mobilelite-duo-3C

 

I've tried all the dual plug flash drives I could find locally and returned them all, utter garbage with 10-20MB/s write speeds. With the reader and a good UHS-I U3 card I get 85-90.

[DarkEnergy]

1 minute ago, Lord Mirdalan said:

Why would that be better that s solution like this?

https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1417005-REG/pny_technologies_p_fd128otgsltc_ge_pny_128gb_duo_link.html/qa

 

I;m not saying you're wrong, just curious.

Because then you can either use flash drives you already have or buy a faster flash drive which are usually type A still. That one you listed looks good but I can't find information on it's speed other than the advertised speed which is never close to the real speed. Unless speed isn't your concern. I'm currently sitting here waiting for a 10gb game to copy to a USB 2.0 flash drive I have and it's going to take over half an hour.

[Lord Mirdalan]

Just now, DarkEnergy said:

Because then you can either use flash drives you already have or buy a faster flash drive which are usually type A still. That one you listed looks good but I can't find information on it's speed other than the advertised speed which is never close to the real speed. Unless speed isn't your concern. I'm currently sitting here waiting for a 10gb game to copy to a USB 2.0 flash drive I have and it's going to take over half an hour.

Oof. Bring snacks.

[DarkEnergy]

3 minutes ago, Kilrah said:

I've been through this and the below with a good fast microSD has proven to be the only viable solution:

 

https://www.kingston.com/en/memory-card-readers/mobilelite-duo-3C

 

I've tried all the dual plug flash drives I could find locally and returned them all, utter garbage with 10-20MB/s write speeds. With the reader and a good UHS-I U3 card I get 85-90.

I spent hours researching flash drives a week ago and it amazes me that micro sd cards appear to be the cheapest fastest and smallest solution for a "flash drive" (with an adapter). Shows just how little flash drive technology has progressed.

[Lord Mirdalan]

1 minute ago, DarkEnergy said:

I spent hours researching flash drives a week ago and it amazes me that micro sd cards appear to be the cheapest fastest and smallest solution for a "flash drive" (with an adapter). Shows just how little flash drive technology has progressed.

I don't know if I'd use that myself. Isn't the sequential performance pretty bad?

[Kilrah]

  

7 minutes ago, Lord Mirdalan said:

I don't know if I'd use that myself. Isn't the sequential performance pretty bad?

 

Definitely not worse than the flash drives, nothing bar an SSD will have proper caching to improve that. In practice it's fine, I even have an Ubuntu install on a 128GB card in one of those readers, I use it regularly and while it's apparent it's not quite as fast as a real SSD it's perfectly usable and I can have it in my pocket and plug it into any computer I need to use that day.

 

Incidentally I have a ~4 year old dual plug Sandisk flash drive that works well with 60MB/s or so writes, long discontinued but better than anything current... and would you know it, it happens it's actually a microSD sealed in it 

 

9 minutes ago, DarkEnergy said:

Shows just how little flash drive technology has progressed.

I think people are pretty ignorant and just look for the cheapest sticks so there's no incentive to make something better while microSDs have uses where it's important... don't know, but yeah it's weird.

[DarkEnergy]

Just now, Lord Mirdalan said:

I don't know if I'd use that myself. Isn't the sequential performance pretty bad?

Sequential speeds are pretty good if you're looking at something like an A2 rated micro sd card, comparable to some of the fastest flash drives. It's the random 4k whatever read and writes where performance suffers. When I was researching, I was specifically looking at the smallest flash drives that were still fast since I don't really want 3 inches of plastic sticking out of my laptop. This was the best solution I've come up with so far. https://www.amazon.com/Samsung-MUF-256AB-AM-Plus-256GB/dp/B07D7PDLXC/ref=sr_1_4?dchild=1&keywords=fast%2Busb%2Bc%2Bflash%2Bdrive&qid=1589233574&sr=8-4&th=1#customerReviews

 

I personally prefer smaller flash drives than the fastest thing ever. Less chance of me bumping it, breaking it and easier to carry around or leave in the computer.

 

If you're looking at a general external drive, something with a cable for instance, get a high speed SSD and enclosure. 

[DarkEnergy]

1 minute ago, Kilrah said:

  I think people are pretty ignorant and just look for the cheapest sticks so there's no incentive to make something better while microSDs have uses where it's important... don't know, but yeah it's weird.

Yup, it appears that flash drives in general have much poorer sales than they used to (cloud computing, etc). No incentives to improve flash drive technology. To be fair though, modern M.2 drives get pretty hot so there's a thermal problem trying to cram something fast into a small space.