• Warranty and customer service: Three- to five-year warranties are standard among USB flash drives from major manufacturers. More than anything, they show a company will at least stand by their product for a few years. Strong customer service is also valuable if something goes wrong. We investigated the most popular flash drives on Amazon and looked through websites of reliable storage companies like Samsung, SanDisk, and Kingston. Alongside over one hundred drives we’ve tested or dismissed over the past 5 years, we researched dozens of new models before settling on the 11 drives to test for this update.

1. Flash Drives For Macs

It’s just slower than SSDs. Chances are, you’ll still be fine with the speeds. Assuming you need a regular flash drive and not an SSD, here are the fastest USB 3.0 or USB 3.1 flash drives. Fastest Write Speed on a USB Flash Drive. $51.99 • Capacity: 128GB, 256GB • Advertised Read Speed: 420 MB/s • UserBenchmark Read Speed: 297 MB/s • Advertised Write Speed: 380 MB/s • UserBenchmark Write Speed: 262 MB/s • Who should buy it: Anyone looking for the overall “fastest flash drive.” The cranks up the read and write speeds, and in fact, UserBenchmark ranks it as the fastest write speed.

Flash Drives For Macs

With the convenience of cloud storage, USB flash drives might seem like old news, but the best are portable, fast, near-indestructible, and offer tons of space—enough that they’re worth having. USB flash drives are made to connect to PCs and laptops as smartphones and tablets do not usually feature bulky USB ports. To get the files from a flash drive to your mobile gadget, you usually need a computer to use as an intermediate.

The was our previous runner-up, but in this round of testing we found inconsistent results in our small file write tests. Out of the box, the Extreme Go started with the fastest speeds of 67 MB/s; yet every file copy after yielded slower and slower results, eventually bottoming out at 5 MB/s.

Pricing: The software is completely free. Platform support: Windows and Mac OS. USB Safeguard is a portable software that can be used to encrypt your drives using AES-256 encryption algorithm. The good thing about this software is that it allows you to create virtual containers to safeguard your data.

Other notable features of DiskCryptor include the ability to encrypt optical discs, and also the system boot-loader. Photo mosaic for mac free. DiskCryptor will serve you just fine if you’re on the hunt for a simple yet capable USB encryption software. However, bear in mind that it can’t create encrypted volumes of specific sizes, and the encryption speeds are a bit on the slower side as well. Platform Availability: Windows 10, 8, 7, Vista, and XP.