We consider traditional stick flash drives, flash drives with retractable heads, and smaller, thumbnail-sized drives. The flash drive should also be durable enough for you to toss it into a bag without concern. Size and build quality: A flash drive should fit easily into a USB port, without making you worry that you might break the drive or the port.Connection type: Our top pick for this guide is a USB-A drive that offers more consistent speeds than our USB-C pick, but our USB-C pick is still quite fast and doesn’t require an additional dongle for use with modern MacBooks or other laptops that primarily have USB-C ports.Some of our picks might not match the speeds of many SSDs, but they should perform better than any platter-based hard drive. Drive speed: Write speeds are a big consideration in our flash drive recommendations-a twofold increase in transfer speed can lead to a practical difference of 15 to 30 minutes of saved time with large folders of variable file sizes.Most people should find that the minimum 128 GB of storage in our current picks gives them plenty of space to store big and small files, without their having to constantly delete some to make room. Capacity: The price of flash storage in thumb drives continues to drop, and in our research and testing we’ve found that the performance of many models varies depending on the amount of storage included.Spending more can sometimes get you more than 256 GB of storage, hardware encryption, or a somewhat more durable case, but more expensive drives don’t really add any benefits for everyday uses. Price: Most people shouldn’t pay more than around $40 for a USB flash drive.

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