Question – What are your favorite USB flash drives?

I’m looking for some that are significantly faster than 30MB/s sequential write speed. Maybe I should have asked a different queston, like what are the alternatives that come closest to the performance of a Sandisk Extreme Pro at same or smaller size and lower cost per GB? I listed a few but a good half of those are significantly slower.

Now I have an answer to my own question, with some help from an Anandtech review, and a Tom’s hardware review listing the best UFD of 2025 which put the Kingston Datetraveler on top but it has the same controller and memory as this Transcend ESC310C, but sans the dual USB interface of both -A and -C.

This greatly exceeds the performance of a Sandisk Extreme Pro, at a significantly smaller (volumetric) size, and significantly lower cost per GB without stooping to using QLC NAND. Granted, cost per GB is a moving target with flash chip density increasing, but Sandisk had the same opportunity to leverage that to drop price per capacity, but didn’t.

This is almost the perfect USB flash drive given the tech available today, except it is a little flimsy including the cap retention. Room to improve, I suppose.

Only posting this because I must have been asleep to not realize that USB flash drives have reached a new level of less-than-yawn performance in recent time, as long as you aren’t transferring more than a few dozen GB at a time, then the pSLC cache and thermal throttling will slow them back down.

I’m not at all suggesting that you’re going to get the same performance as an NVME in an enclosure, but if you aren’t constantly transferring several dozen GB of data at a time, they seem to have their purpose, at a lower cost per capacity and much smaller size with no USB cable needed, than an NVME enclosure. Literally, the drive itself is less objectionable to carry around than the cable itself for an NVME enclosure. Defeats the purpose for NVME enclosures?

This from an amazon review, because I’m lazy.