Buying a USB flash drive is confusing nowadays because there are hundreds of branded flash drives with different storage capacities and price. To narrow down your search, there are a few essential points you should keep in mind while buying any flash drive or you can also check the daily top ten lists of the popular USB drives. Keep reading to know more:
1. Design: Portability
Flash drives now come in various designs; swivel, with a cap, retractable USB connector and the most common nowadays, the metallic ones without any cap or swivel protector. So, which one to buy? If you use your USB drives for carrying them to your workplace and back home, then do not buy any designer flash drives or with caps because you might lose the cap while carrying it in your pocket.
The drives with retractable USB connector are not good because the slider gets loose and whenever you try to insert it into the USB port, it never connects properly. So the best flash drives for carrying are those with metal casing and with the keychain attachments. You can easily carry them with your car keys and never forget them anywhere.
If you want to carry your flash drive with the car keys then always buy those made of metal, not plastic. The flash drives made of plastic easily gets broken.
2. Interface: Read and Write speed
The main reason for buying a new flash drive is that you want more storage capacity and faster read and write speed. For read and write speed, you need to keep this in mind – USB 3.0/3.1. The read and write speed depends on the interface of the USB drive, which gives you the best reading and writing speed, up to 240MB/S reading and 150MB/S writing (speed varies for different manufacturers).
3. USB OTG functionality: Your phone will love it
Smartphones are rapidly taking over PC and laptops, and now you need USB flash drive for your smartphone too! So make sure the next USB flash drive you buy should have USB OTG functionality. With USB OTG, you can easily connect your USB OTG drive to your phone and transfer your data from PC to your smartphone.
4. Ultra Slim: Not ultra smart
There are lots of USB drives in the market who claims to be ultra slim. These drives do not connect properly with the USB port, can easily be broken and have a chance of data loss if disturbed during data transfer. The slim USB drives with metal casing are durable, but data loss can also occur in these drives as they don’t connect properly to the USB port.
5. Designer drives
Do not buy designer drives available if you want to do some serious task with it. The designer drives come with low-quality build because these are meant for collecting purpose mainly. You should know why SanDisk, Kingston, Transcend and Strontium don’t make designer flash drives? The answer is simple; designer USB drives are not convenient than the regular ones.
6. Bonus Tip: Secure drives
If you have some important and secret documents that you want to keep safe, go for drives which come with security key lock. These drives come with a number pad so you can lock or unlock it using the key. The drive saves your data encrypted so no one can get access to your data without the PIN.
Conclusion
So, these were the basic points you should keep in mind when buying a new USB flash drive. I recommend you to check for alternatives all the time, do not go for a flash drive just because you see a brand name written on it. Always try to do some research before buying a USB drive so you can get the worth of your single penny.
