I saw this article from ZDnet yesterday, discussing fast USB thumb drives and was wondering if anyone used these? The thumb drives in the article were supplied by OWC. ZDnet

I've been using USB 3.0 SSD thumb drives for roughly 2 years. There are at least 3 vendors on Amazon selling them. Going for about 50 cents a GB right now.

A USB extension cable is handy with one of these. They are a little wider than the average thumb drive and can block other ports.

Some of them run very hot, even with an all-aluminum enclosure. Early ones got hot enough to soften the solder holding the USB connector to the board and were prone to failure as a result. I wonder whether OWC has solved that problem effectively.

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I've used USB3 thumb drives for about a year.

I think it's flash storage, not SSD (I think), and definitely not mSATA SSD. I'm not intimate with the nomenclature, so I'm not sure.

These run a little warm, but boot my minis quickly and I can navigate doing basic task without the minis feeling slow. They are faster than the internal 5400rpm HD.

If you shop for a fast USB3 drive, you'll notice the difference in speed, just as you would with faster USB2 thumb drives compared to slower USB2 drives.

I booted minis and an iMac from a USB2 thumb and they were glacially slow. Click... wait... wait... wait... From my USB3 drives, most people, under, light weight circumstances, would never know the difference.

Moving files is also improved. I have TV shows and movies up to a few GBs, and they took minutes, and are now down to seconds, but still a little slow.

From the article, I'm not sure what the 16x is compared to, but the cost at this point, is far more than I'd ever consider.

I've got time.

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Hi everyone,

I don't consider items like the OWC Envoy Pro Mini a flash drive. They're noticeably larger in size than a common flash drives. Smaller than a typical external drive but still larger than a typical flash drive. To me, they're small external SSDs. That makes them a different class of storage device. As expected, they offer external SSD performance and are priced accordingly.

My preferred USB 3.0 flash drive is the SanDisk Extreme and Extreme Pro series drives. They're wicked fast, the size of a common flash drive and priced well. You can purchase a SanDisk Extreme Pro 128GB for $59.99.

You can also roll your own msata based frankendrive for less than the price of the OWC Envy Mini. Cases for msata drives can be had for less then $20.00 and a 256GB MSata SSD can be had for noticeably less than $100.00. 'course, they are available in higher capacities, too. A key difference would be size. These wouldn't be as small as the Envoy Pro Mini. The quality of the enclosure would be inferior, too. OWC uses high quality enclosures.

Still, OWC offers the Envoy Pro Mini at a very fair price considering its performance, capacity, size and build quality. If I was in the market for a 256GB flash drive, I'd seriously consider one. Then again, I like the idea of rolling my own because I can swap the lower capacity drive for a higher capacity model in the future. Not sure how easy that would be to do with the Envoy Pro Mini.

Robert

....just be careful where you stick that thumb..........

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NewtonMP2100
....just be careful where you stick that thumb..........

a heavy fart and a match could propel that drive the furthest and farthest evah.

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RAMd®d
I've used USB3 thumb drives for about a year.

I think it's flash storage, not SSD...

Unless what you bought was explicitly "SSD" then yeah, it's just a flash drive that's got a USB 3.0 connector on it.

There's a world of difference between that and a thumb-drive SSD. Boots nearly as rapidly as the internal drive on a MBP-Retina and after weeding through the first-gen devices they've proven more reliable than regular flash.

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Onamuji,

There is also a world of difference between USB 3.0 flash drives. Some are as sluggish as a USB 2.0 model. Others, like the SanDisk Extreme and Extreme Pro flash drives, are wicked fast. Not SSD fast but far more than sufficiently fast enough that the average person likely wouldn't care about the difference. To me, the more critical concern would be reliability. Which is going to be more reliable, an SSD thumb drive or a flash drive?

Robert

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Robert M
Which is going to be more reliable, an SSD thumb drive or a flash drive?

Assume that they're both made to high standards? The SSD will far outlast the dumb flash drive. You get a "smart" controller, a higher class of memory supporting more writes over its lifetime, garbage collection and overprovisioning with a SSD.

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Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 06/30/2016 05:49PM by Onamuji.