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thumb drive recommendations?
#33504 03/21/15 01:35 PM
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jchuzi Online OP
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I would like to purchase one or more USB 3 thumb drives. Which brands are reliable? Any and all comments are appreciated.


Jon

macOS 11.7.10, iMac Retina 5K 27-inch, late 2014, 3.5 GHz Intel Core i5, 1 TB fusion drive, 16 GB RAM, Epson SureColor P600, Photoshop CC, Lightroom CC, MS Office 365
Re: thumb drive recommendations?
jchuzi #33507 03/21/15 02:19 PM
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I have never encountered problems with any thumb drives, but I will look for Lexar (for all of their features) but they are more difficult to find around here. I often end up Kingston (because I really like their enclosure) or SanDisk (because they are the most commonly available).


If we knew what it was we were doing, it wouldn't be called research, would it?

— Albert Einstein
Re: thumb drive recommendations?
jchuzi #33508 03/21/15 02:30 PM
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Jon,

I have a couple of Kingston DT R500 64 Gb which have rubberized casings and although they are USB 2, they are very acceptable speedwise. The price is listed at about $100 but here in Canada, they go for less that $60...+tax
jaybass


OS 13.6.4 iMac (Retina 5K, 27", 2017, 3.4 GHz Intel Core i5, 24 GB RAM, 2400 MHz DDR4. SuperDuper. 1 TB Lacie HD
Re: thumb drive recommendations?
jchuzi #33509 03/21/15 03:48 PM
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First off, I do not have personal experience with USB-3 thumb drives, only with the USB-2 variety. That said, there are many web sites comparing and rating thumb drives. This one is as good as any to start. In general, you can look at the following variables:

- If top writing speed is an issue (reading is up to 2-2.5x faster), you’d go for drives that best 100MB/sec (for a 32GB drive; speed increases with drive capacity).
- If price is important, know that right now (March 2015) you pay as little as $1 for 2.5GB, or $0.40/GB.
- If you need encryption, your best bet is with the hardware supported version, which is more expensive than listed above.

There are other hardware considerations (TRIM etc.), but that is not likely to be a big issue for standard use and the prices involved. Likewise, I haven’t yet seen much about failures and/or longevity, so that may not be much different from past experiences. Against this background it’s good to remember that it remains bad practice to have just one copy of a particular data set on any type of medium, including thumb drives.

With all this, keep in mind that developments don’t stop: next year’s crop will likely do better than today’s, but if you like your current buy it’ll likely be still fine then. Finally, I beg to disagree with jaybass by saying that there is little reason to get USB-2 drives, as the price differential with USB-3 is increasingly negligible, while the speed advantage of your judiciously chosen model isn’t.


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Re: thumb drive recommendations?
alternaut #33514 03/21/15 11:13 PM
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jchuzi Online OP
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So far, Sandisk looks like as good a bet as any. I mainly want it for creating a Yosemite installer (David Pogue gives the instructions in his Missing Manual book about Yosemite). I already have a Time Machine backup as well as a clone backup.


Jon

macOS 11.7.10, iMac Retina 5K 27-inch, late 2014, 3.5 GHz Intel Core i5, 1 TB fusion drive, 16 GB RAM, Epson SureColor P600, Photoshop CC, Lightroom CC, MS Office 365
Re: thumb drive recommendations?
jchuzi #33522 03/23/15 12:18 PM
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Originally Posted By: jchuzi
I would like to purchase one or more USB 3 thumb drives. Which brands are reliable? Any and all comments are appreciated.


I've had a fair amount of experience with higher end flash drives for several years though I haven't ran through a huge variety. I've owned multiple lexar firefly and have had good luck with them. One key feature they have is that the lanyard attaches to the cap instead of the drive. This may appear counter-intuitive, but when you uncap it you leave the lanyard on your neck etc and if you walk away from the computer without collecting your drive, you'll quickly realize it as the empty cap flops around. I've never gotten more than 15 feet from a computer without my flash drive since then.

I've owned several Centon Datastick Sport, again for their high capacity and lower price. Both of the two I bought had to be RMA'd within a year.

I've owned several sandisk cruzer and have had good result from all of them. They're exceptionally small for their capacity.

I've also owned several ADATA, due to their being the largest capacity drives at the time. One of them was DOA out of the box but I didn't discover it until after it got to the halfway point in its storage, this was the only time I've ever been burned by a seller on ebay.

I recently bought a PNY for pretty cheap, 128gb USB3. I was expecting it to be slow for the price ($42 a year ago) but to my surprise it's been a very good performer.

So for now if I had to buy another flash drive I'd probably go with PNY or Sandisk. IGNORE any speed indications on the packaging, they almost exclusively use deceptive terminology such as "usb 3 speed INTERFACE". (the interface is fast, but the flash is slow, so the drive is slow) You need to read reviews to determine actual USB3 speeds. Normally I don't spend much time reading reviews before a purchase, but it's really necessary with flash drives.

I just lost some data this week on a flash drive I was given with documents on it. I was editing both text files and excel spreadsheets. When I went to open then again, the text files were blank and the spreadsheets gave an error when opened. I found that both files were the expected size (7kb and 75kb) but were completely filled with zeros. I was not impressed. Any new file I try to create or duplicate produces all zeros in the saved file. I was able to reconstruct the spreadsheet but its looking like the text file data is gone. My time machine backups have all zeros in them as well. (they were never saved successfully, without my knowing there was a problem) Somehow the auto backup feature in bbedit got turned off too. frown

That brings me to my other point. After you plug in a flash drive, open time machine prefs and go to options. Select the flash drive from the exclusions list and click [-] to remove it from exclusions so you get backups of it. Like your computer, it will store "offline backups" when you are making changes to files on the flash drive while on the road or on another computer, the backups will be saved to a hidden file on the flash drive, and offloaded to your time machine drive the next time you get home and plug both in at the same time. Very handy feature. Newly attached external storage (HDD or flash drive) are automatically added to the exclusion list for time machine, so you have to disable any new drive you attach if you want it backed up.


I work for the Department of Redundancy Department
Re: thumb drive recommendations?
jchuzi #33523 03/23/15 03:10 PM
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I have had good success with Mushkin. When I did a search on Amazon and New Egg a few years ago, it came up with very high ratings. As of now I am using the Mushkin USB 3.0 Ventura Pro 32 GB. It is fast as far as my usage. On one of them I have the DiskWarrior 5.0 Application and a startup disk upgrade and it is fine.


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