Micro Center SuperSpeed 2 Pack 16GB USB 3.0 Flash Drive Gum Size Memory Stick Thumb Drive Data Storage Jump Drive (16G 2-Pack)

I've been buying these little Microcenter sticks regularly since the 32gb variants were $70, and that was a bargain back then. They continue to get bigger, and are still cheap! Luckily, they're cheap... Because that's mostly the appeal. You'll see a lot of reviews complaining about speeds, and others glowing about speeds. Here's the breakdown on this: it depends. Silicon is not a perfect process, there will always be variations. In my attached pictures, you'll see very different numbers for the different capacities.. And guess what? If I had multiples of the same capacities, you'd likely see similar variations between the "same" drives.. Because no two pieces of silicon are going to perform the same. When you pay more for a thumb drive, you're paying for a process known as "binning", where the company only uses silicon that meets certain specs they're going for. Inland (manufacturer of the Microcenter drives), as far as I'm aware, uses the "rejected" silicon of other companies. "How awful!", you're thinking... But it's really not. A lot of the time, there's nothing at all wrong with the silicon, it just didn't meet the original manufacturer's standards. It's why these sticks are so cheap, and usually why the performance varies so wildly from stick to stick.There are many technical aspects of these I can dwell on, but basically, these are relatively awful devices, but at awfully excellent prices. I've been buying them for years, and while performance is laughable, I myself haven't had one die on me. I've felt like I'd die waiting for some transfers to complete, but the sticks themselves keep going. Even my $70 32gb stick back from 2009 is still going. I use it to bootstrap a mini computer that lacks an HDD. This, again, is all wildly variable... You may have it die on you, or you may have excellent luck, like I've had... But that's really how all products are these days. Sad but true. Luckily Microcenter will swap it out for you if it messes up.I will ding these one star for the controller. The Phison chips choke easily. If I'm writing to a drive at all, reading is out of the question. These things cannot read while writing to save their lives. So if you're planning on running a live OS on it (such as making a Linux stick), these are hard to recommend for that purpose. Even downloading a small file, it can cause the system to go unresponsive for upwards a minute at a time while the controller figures out what it's actually doing.So to sum up, for movies, music, documents, any typical daily usage, etc.. These are fine little sticks. They are terrible for live OS purposes. They've been reliable for me, and the performance is going to vary from stick to stick. If you need something more consistent, by all means, pay more.. But for most of my uses, these are my workhorses.Update: 2/10/21: still going strong. Have purchased more of these since this review, and no issues. My original 32gb stick from 2009 finally died, but it was physical damage from me accidentally snapping the plug off of it when it was plugged in. Almost 12 years out of a "cheap" stick is quite impressive, and I wish I could've seen how much longer it would have gone had I not broken it.Amazon is recommending I make a mention of storage capacity (as "advertised", though keep in mind the overheads. 256GB will not actually be 256gb, as roughly 15% is overhead. This applies to all drives)Amazon also recommends I mention "ease of use"... It's a thumb drive. They all work the same way. Plug em in and put stuff on em.And finally, Amazon recommends I mention "warmth", and this is a recommendation I agree is worth discussing. I never even considered it an issue until I was looking at other drives to serve as a boot drive, and indeed, these drives do emit some heat when under load. It's noticeably warmer than it would be when idle, but never a cause of concern. I wouldn't bother mentioning it unless I was asked about it, as it never seemed abnormally warm.

It's been my experience when using flash drives like these it is important to Never Format them... I purchased the Yellow 128GB model and it works Great! This drive appears to be a TRUE 128GB drive. In reality, it may be a 64GB drive with some sort of doubling software or formatted in a way to create 128GB from a 64GB drive. Compression is used on many server drives in order to store more data... YOU CANNOT RECREATE THAT SPECIAL FORMAT IF YOU FORMAT THAT DRIVE IN WINDOWS! So if you want to continue to use the drives from this seller and retain it's capacity, "NEVER FORMAT" the drive. COPY, PASTE and DELETE files but do not format...

As a low-end USB 3.0 drive, this performs about as well as you'd expect. The read speeds are around 110MB/s, depending on file size, and the write speed is only about 9 MB/s in the best of circumstances.Compared to other low-end USB drives, this has a slightly faster read speed with large files, but has a very slow write speed, and does extremely poorly with small files.If you're buying this to be a top-end, primary use drive, especially to copy and move lots of files, then you will be disappointed. If you need something that's more-or-less disposable, then this is a decent choice. I find drives like this useful to keep around with utilities and system installers. For instance, Hiren's boot cd, or a Windows 10 installation drive.

On the first purchase, I was only able to obtain USB 1.0 speeds between 38 to 102 KB/s. . . . Pathetic!.The above was replaced by a second functioning model. Performance was below my top-of-the-line PATRIOTIC MEMORY SUPERSONIC MAGNUM, which cruises at 81-95 MB/s. The MICRO CENTER SUPERSPEED was sustaining 1.4-5.0 MB/s. The fastest was 23 MB/s on infrequent peak speed, which lasted for 1 to 2 seconds.

Write speed: 7.5MB/sRead speed: 118MB/sRead is good.Write at this capacity is ridiculous (bad)(250,000 MB) @ (7.5MB/s)I tested moving a 4k video from SSD on my computer. 4790k 4.4ghz usb 3.0 (3GB) file size.3,000/7.5s = 400s/60 = 6.6m. it took 6.6 minutes to write a 3gig file.If you move a more complex cluster of files with folders. It will be less than half that speed. The larger the file the slower the drive gets.In layman's terms this would take an eternity to fill the drive to 75% capacity. Approx 7 hours of data transfer.All drives now days should do a minimum of 25Mb/s write. But we are in a revolution of flash memory chips that are in such demand, that USB drivess get the worst of the (binning process) SSD, M.2's and NVME are cherry picked for everything now days. You have to actually spend about $40+ to get a drive that can write at acceptable speeds. (25MB/s+)Examples:Sandisk extremePNY pro elitePatriot supersonic rageAlso for all the computer illiterate's out there..(Drive size) and (useable size) are not the same. Because a kilo-byte (1,000 bytes) of data is actually measured in (1,024 bytes) so as drives scale up in size. The capacity is exponentially decreased.There is also a buffer in every drive for the operation of the storage controller.So when you get a drive. Its allways less than whats measured. Blame the guys who decided to measure kilobytes in units of 1024 instead of 1000.In layman's terms your drive will have less capacity than what is advertised always.Bottom line this drive is not adequate for its capacity.However if you write small files at a time. And use this as a back-up. This moght work.As long as you need the storage and write to it incrementally. Or just pictures/ music, this should be fine. Just dont expect it to fill up very fast.