Need a good flash drive? Raspberry Pi made one for you
Raspberry Pi continues its expansion into hardware accessories and components. In addition to SD cards and SSDs, you can now get an official Raspberry Pi USB stick. It’s intended to be a bootable drive for Pi boards, but you can also use it like any other flash drive.
The new Raspberry Pi USB flash drive is a standard USB 3.0 flash drive, with a USB Type-A connector and an all-aluminum housing. It also has a built-in loop for attaching to a key ring or lanyard. The drive is available in 128 GB and 256 GB capacities.
So why does Raspberry Pi sell its own USB stick? Well, just like with official SD cards and SSDs, the goal is to provide reliable, high-performance storage for Raspberry Pi systems. If you need a USB boot drive for your Pi card, or just general purpose storage tested to a higher standard than a no-name brand flash drive on Amazon, you now have the Raspberry Pi flash drive as another option.
The drive can support a write speed of 75 MB/s on the 128 GB version, or 150 MB/s on the 256 GB version. It won’t beat an external SSD, or even some external hard drives, but it’s probably faster than the USB stick in your drawer right now. The drives also support SMART health reporting and TRIM operations, and they will enter USB 3.0 low power mode when not in use.
Raspberry Pi explained in a blog post: “Like many high-density NAND flash storage devices, the Raspberry Pi flash drive uses a small pseudo-SLC cache pool to improve performance under burst write workloads. In the background, all writes allocated in pSLC are streamed to the higher-density, but slower, QLC flash. This has significant advantages: for short periods of time, the sequential write speed can be almost as fast as USB 3.0. »
The only major downside here is that you only get a USB 3.0 Type-A port. Some other flash drives, like the SanDisk Ultra Dual Drive Luxe, have Type-A and Type-C connectors. Plugging Raspberry Pi drives into most phones and tablets, as well as many newer laptops, will require a separate Type-C adapter or USB hub.
There’s no shortage of high-quality USB drives, like the Samsung FIT Plus that I use with my NAS for occasional backups, or the SanDisk Ultra Flair. However, now you have another option for a fast and reliable flash drive. It even has a Raspberry Pi logo on it.
You can purchase the Raspberry Pi USB stick starting today from authorized Pi sellers. It’s $30 for the 128GB version or $55 for the 256GB model.
Source: Raspberry Pi
