Silicon Power 32GB USB 3.0 Flash Driveīear in mind that just because a drive is USB 3.0 doesn’t mean it’s all that much faster. 4 GB flash drives can often be found on sale for $5. Many USB 2.0 flash drives are super cheap - for example, you can pick up an 8 GB USB 2.0 flash drive for under $10 on Amazon.

The fastest drive seems to achieve its speed by using “four channels of flash” memory instead of a single one. Unsurprisingly, the slowest drives were the cheapest, while the faster ones are more expensive. The best USB 3.0 drive was over 28 times faster.Įditor’s Note: if you want a great USB 3.0 Flash drive, click here for the one that How-To Geek uses. The worst USB 3.0 drive was faster than the USB 2.0 drives, but only by a tiny bit. What’s really interesting here is the huge variation in speeds. The USB 3.0 drives they tested go from 11.4 MB/s all the way up to 286.2 MB/s.

The test also includes a few USB 2.0 drives, which are at the bottom of the charts at between 7.9 MB/s to 9.5 MB/s in write speed. There are quite a few benchmarks out there, but Tom’s Hardware’s 2013 test of USB 3.0 thumb drives is particularly recent and comprehensive.

Usb 2 vs usb 3 router storage