In this case, a fast USB-C flash drive can be just the thing, with the newfangled connection allowing use on a wide range of devices like phones, tablets and games consoles too. Case in point is Samsung’s 128GB model, which is reduced to £12 today from its usual price of £20.
Get a 128GB Samsung USB-C flash drive for £12 (was £20)
The general advantage of these sorts of drives is that your initial outlay is far, far less than a portable SSD, as you’re getting slower flash memory and a smaller capacity. This makes sense as a combined offering - you’d want faster transfer speeds if you had a bigger drive, so that copying all the data off of it wouldn’t take too long, but with a 128GB drive as we have here, a 400MB/s maximum read speed sounds about right - that’s faster than many early SSDs of the same size. However, writes are much slower, rated at 30MB/s, so filling the drive in the first place takes an order of magnitude longer. That’s not a deal-breaker, but does make the drive better for smaller files where the slower write speeds aren’t a problem, or for situations where you benefit from faster copying speeds but can read slowly but steadily (eg playing back a copied file on a TV directly). In any case, if you think of this as more of a faster flash drive rather than a cheaper SSD, then you’ll likely be quite happy with this drive’s performance. And at £12, it’s cheap enough to pick up as an insurance policy after some cursory research. Ganesh over at Anandtech reviewed the 256GB size of the drive and reflected favourably on its sustained performance and the physical build quality. That’s good enough for me!
