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DCBassman

macrumors 65816
Original poster
Oct 28, 2021
1,146
876
West Devon, UK
Not sure if this has been done before, but here's an update if it has.
USB3 flash drives that I've found to be reliable and quick:
1) Sandisk Ultra Flair 32GB - I have several of these, and they have been utterly solid.
2) Integral 360C duaL-usb 32gb, which has USB-A one end and C the other. New-ish to me, and not quite as quick as the Sandisks, but great value on Amazon.co.uk at the time of writing.
Samsung Bar Plus are also good, and very quick, but 64GB seems to be the smallest, and not so cheap either.
Samsung Fit Plus are super-compact and very good also, again 64GB smallest.
Obviously, this will be heavily location-dependent, and this is for the UK. With the demise of Ebuyer, Amazon is the way to go if you're happy you're not getting knock-offs.

If this is covered elsewhere, I'll get it moved.
 
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I'm partial to the SanDisk Cruzer models, which typically come in 16GB. Been pretty solid for me.
 
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Just checked and most of my USB flash drives seem to be Kingston but I have few Samsung and others too. They all work fine and quickly with my Macs and PCs. One of the Kingstons broke recently, I cannot format it for some reason.

But, I have bad experiences with PNY brand. I have two of those and they both are suuuuuper slow in Macs. I mean they appear slow, they are read and written slow and ejecting them takes minutes and can fail, also formatting can fail. In Windows machines they seem to work normally.

Yes, external USB SSDs are better and usually faster too.
 
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