| RANK | #1 | #2 | #3 | #4 | #5 | #6 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| The Kingston Data Traveler 256 GB, Not Cheap but Huge Data Storage | LaCie iamaKey 8 GB USB Flash Drives | SanDisk Cruzer Blade Flash Drive | SanDisk Cruzer 16 GB Cruzer | Kingston Data Traveler Locker+ with Encryption 8 GB USB 2.0 Hi-Speed DataTraveler DTL+/8 GB | Lexar JumpDrive Secure II Plus | |
| Capacity Capacity: Capacity | 256GB | 8GB | 16GB | 16GB | 8GB | 16GB |
| Encrypted Encrypted: Encrypted | ||||||
| List price List price: List price | $782.80 | $47.00 | $24.99 | $26.95 | $50.00 | $34.99 |
| Sale price Sale price: Sale price | $120.45 | $44.99 | $4.89 | $11.50 | $6.38 | |
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| The Kingston Data Traveler 256 GB, Not Cheap but Huge Data Storage | LaCie iamaKey 8 GB USB Flash Drives | SanDisk Cruzer Blade Flash Drive | SanDisk Cruzer 16 GB Cruzer | Kingston Data Traveler Locker+ with Encryption 8 GB USB 2.0 Hi-Speed DataTraveler DTL+/8 GB | Lexar JumpDrive Secure II Plus |
It is hard to get excited about flash drives. You know what I mean. Either they work or they don’t. And anyway, doesn’t everyone have a pile of old ones just sitting around? Well I’ve got to say that in the past 6 months I’ve dumped most of my old ones apart from one or two sitting in my desk at work for emergency document storage. But I’ve bought three SanDisk Cruzers in the last couple of months and couldn’t be happier with them.If I had to choose a single USB that I had to recommend to someone looking for the best USB flash drive it would be one of these. Two were 16 GB and one was a 4 GB and I could not have been happier with them. The only downside is their cost. When I think about it I’ve spent enough on flash drives to have actually bought a mini USB hard drive with 160 GB capacity. But I still really like the flexibility of the flash drives.
What to Look For When You Buy a USB Flash Drive
There are a few characteristics to consider when buying a flashing drive. The first is obviously capacity. It is easy to say that more is better,but that’s not necessarily the case, especially if you are looking for the best value. Flash Drives with capacities of 16GB to 32GB seem to offer some of the best value in terms of dollars per GB and also convenience.
The next thing to look at is transfer speed – here there is sometimes a tradeoff between capacity and speed, so you may not necessarily want the biggest drive. If you are simply using static documents, speed is not much of an issue, but if you are streaming large media files such as movies then you will want something quite fast.
That said, most USB 2 drives these days are fast enough for video.
The third thing to look at is encryption. The price of AE256 encryption has fallen dramatically in recent years and it is easily good enough for most purposes if you want to keep documents private.
My favourites are the Sandisk Micro range for the reasons I outline below.
What do I love about the SanDisk flas drive?
Okay. To start with, 16 GB is one heck of a lot of capacity. I find that I can cram it with music files, a huge stack of PDFs and still easily have loads of space for some music and a couple of videos. When I’m travelling for work (which if you’ve been following my blog by now you’ve gathered that I do quite a lot of work travelling) I find it super convenient to have all that stuff. Before a long flight I just download everything I possibly think will be useful research material for my current project, dump it all onto the memory stick, and then have plenty to keep me busy on the flight.
In fact I find that some of my most productive time is when I’m flying because I don’t have the telephone or e-mail distracting me. But I do like to have all my documents immediately at hand and I find this way of working off a USB drive on my laptop and desktop a lot more convenient than trying all sorts of fancy synchronization of folders and drives. This means off course that I have a whole pile of USB flash drives with me a lot of the time.
The SanDisk is fast
I’ve played quite a bit of video and also done loads of big transfers and I’ve found that this usb drive is more than fast enough for my needs. Now I’m sure there are a whole lot of usb flash drives that are faster at data transfer, but this is plenty for my needs
The Sandisk flash drive is small
This goes without saying but this drive has a nifty little pop-in mechanism so it folds down on itself and doesn’t have a cap that you can misplace. That makes it about a third smaller than most other thumb drives. Unlike a hard drive, even a compact one, this can easily slip into a pocket and you really don’t even know it is there.
U3 Software included
A lot of people complain about U3 being included on disks. This software allows you to boot up and run a whole bunch of applications from your thumbdrive. I sometimes download open office onto mine so that I can be sure of opening and using word documents wherever I am. But more important for me is the built in security application that allows you to lock down and password protect the drive. I don’t know how seriously secure this is. I’m sure that proper and full encryption would do a better job of keeping really sensitive data safe, but for me its enough just to know that some stranger can’t get into my files without having to ask the NSA to crack the password. Frankly, if you don’t like U3 then just delete it. There you have it, the best USB Flash drive.
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