

Warranty and customer service: Three- to five-year warranties are standard among USB flash drives from major manufacturers.We considered traditional stick flash drives, flash drives with retractable heads, and smaller, thumbnail-sized drives. The flash drive should also be durable enough to toss into a bag without breaking. Size and build quality: Flash drives should easily fit into a USB port without worry of breaking the drive or the port.But our USB-C pick is still reasonably fast and doesn’t require an additional dongle to use with modern MacBooks or other notebooks that primarily feature USB-C ports. If speed is your number-one concern, you can use a faster USB-A drive with a USB-C–to–USB-A adapter. Connection type: Our pick for this guide is a USB-A drive that is a good deal faster than our USB-C pick.

As in previous years and previous versions of this guide, read speeds were uniformly fast on all of our picks. We’re still waiting for a USB flash drive that supports USB 3.1 Gen 2. File transfer speeds with our picks won’t match many SSDs, but our picks should perform as well or better than any platter-based hard drive.

