Looking for the Perfect USB Flash Drive

nopersonalspace@lemmy.world to Selfhosted@lemmy.world – 16 points –

I've been using some cheap flash drives for things like installing OSs and the like, but now I've picked up a Dell Wyse 3040 system to play with which only has 8gb of storage. So I'm installing the OS onto a flash drive permanently (don't worry, just for messing with, nothing of value will be lost if/when the drive craps out).

However, the performance of my cheap flash drive is terrible and installing packages & transferring files is so slow. My question is: Would getting a better drive make a meaningful difference here? If so, anyone have some recommendations of drives they like that are fast?

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As a general purpose USB (which not only works great for daily use as a thumb drive but also works with no issues as Linux Live or persistent USB) I can recommend the Sandisk Ultra line. I had them everywhere from 16GB to 128GB. They never let me down. The housing might look like it's made from flimsy plastic but it's surprising sturdy.

A second drive I'm currently preparing for use as a persistent Linux drive is the Samsung portable SSD T7. It's nice and sturdy and the USB C to USB C interface allows me to easily run it on my Laptop without using up any of my precious USB A ports.

Yeah seems like sandisk ultra is the way to go. Do you know, is there any disadvantage to using the "Ultra Fit" line of smaller drives that sit much more flush to the case? Those look nice, but IDK if there are performance issues with the smaller package

No I haven't tested them yet. However something I do notice is that people tend to forget the small drives much more often. Simply because of the form factor.

I think the ultra fit uses some other piece of flash, I'd just recommend the plain Ultra or the Luxe. They pretty much have the same chip inside iirc