Micro Center Pro 128GB USB 3.1 Gen1 Flash Drive Faster USB Stick External Data Storage Thumb Drive (128GB, Yellow)

Make sure you understand what you're getting. These USB drives, like basically all cheap low-end USB 3 drives, have decent read performance but poor write performance. Maximum sequential write speeds are around USB 2.0 speeds - not horrible, but not great. Writing 100GB of data will take you over an hour. However, reading data back off the drive can be done at more than 100MB/sec, which isn't too bad. I do not judge these drives harshly for their poor write performance - that's part of the deal for these cheap, tiny, large capacity USB drives. (Many of these cheap drives just use the same chip as would be found on a low-grade MicroSD card permanently soldered to a USB bridge, which partly explains the small size and relatively poor performance.) If there's anything to complain about it's the way these drives are advertised - TECHNICALLY yes they can deliver some decent speeds, but that only ever applies to reads, not writes. The reason some people appear to see a short burst of fast writes has to do with OS filesystem caching, not the drive itself.I like to use these drives to sneakernet very large data sets between myself and friends or colleagues. I'll just start the copy prior to going to bed or whatever and then the next morning the copy is done and the drive is ready to be handed off.If you need faster write (and read) performance, you can either get an "Extreme" USB drive (e.g. SanDisk Extreme Pro), you can get a dedicated USB SSD (e.g. Samsung T series), or you can build your own external SSD out of an M.2 drive (or even a 2.5" SATA drive) and an enclosure. For around $40 you could easily put together a 128GB M.2 based USB SSD with great read/write performance. The main advantage of these drives is their small size - they're very easy to carry around with you. $39 for a 512GB drive isn't too bad from a $/GB perspective, but if you need performance and can handle a larger device, just find a decent 512GB SATA or M.2 SSD and accompanying enclosure - it won't be as pocketable and it'll cost a little more, but it'll have great performance.

The LED helps prevent premature disconnection and trashing of the drive!

The Good:- Works Well. You won't have any trouble with lost or missing files/bugs causing you to lose access to your info, etc. This is a good quality brand.- The Price. You won't find a less expensive USB in this price range (unless you buy generic, off-brand junk).Please don't buy generic, off-brand junk. I've lost more data that way than I care to admit.This is about as inexpensive as you can get before you start to reach the USBs that won't last more than a few months.The Bad:- The USB is very slow to transfer files of any size (a few gigs or more). It's not horribly slow... it just takes much longer than a more expensive USB would take.For example, transferring 15 gigs of data takes about 45 minutes or so to go from my computer to this thing. Not horrible... just not as fast as you'd expect.Overall Verdict:This USB is great for storing things - as long as transfer speed isn't a major issue for you.I use it mostly for files I have in long-term storage that I rarely need to copy to somewhere else. For that purpose, it works great.

It writes easily twice as fast once formatted to NTFS, with peaks three times as fast. It's still not what you'd call fast. The speed estimate says it would still take four hours to fill this thing up.It uses the usbstor driver class. For higher performance, look for a device that advertises "UASP."As for reliability, I just unpacked it three hours ago. No idea.FWIW, I'm getting my speed readings by using rclone to do a multi-threaded copy of mp3 files (each file multiple megabytes). Windows Task Manager shows source drive at 4% utilization while the flash drive is pegged at 100%. Task Manager shows the drive writing at 27MB/s, while rclone shows writing at 11.6 Mbytes/S. YMMVAddendum: Like others report, 60-70 Mbps until the cache is full, then it slows WAY down. The second half of the drive seems slower than the first half. Was seeing 11, now it's more than half full and I'm only seeing 5 on a USB 3.0 port. Was 5 at the start of the sentence, now 3.5. Increasingly disenchanted with this drive.

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This 256 GB USB stick is a good deal for the money. It gets a little warm while in use, but not excessively so. The mechanical quality leaves a bit to be desired as the type-A USB connector jiggles a little in the plastic cover. In the past I have run into problems with such connectors over time where they become more and more loose and eventually half disappear into the plastic casing, making it hard to fully plug them in.The raw drive capacity (before partitioning and formatting) is 251,658,240,000 Bytes, which is a bit short of the advertised 256 GB, but that is unfortunately not uncommon in the industry. Read speeds are advertised as "up to 130 MB/s" and indeed I measure performance slightly better for sustained read speeds and even better for short bursts. The write speed is unfortunately not noted anywhere and it reaches a sustained write speed of about 24 MB/s, which means it takes about 3 hours to fill it to capacity.Speed test (with f3 tools):Writing/reading as many 1 GB files (in 1 MB block transfers) as the drive can hold. Write speed: 23.6 MB/s sustained, 130 MB/s peak (bursts) Read speed: 134.6 MB/s sustained, 149 MB/s peak (bursts)Capacity test:No bad blocks or capacity fraud was detected (with f3write/f3read/f3probe).