Raspberry Pi Flash Drive available now from $30: a high-quality essential accessory

A USB flash drive is one of those small essentials you reach for from time to time to back up data or transfer files between your Raspberry Pi and substitute computers. For basics like these, it’s tempting to reach for the cheapest thing on Amazon or whatever you find in your local supermarket, but you can easily end up with a device that has sluggish read and write speeds, fragile casing, or – worst of all – far less storage capacity than it claims. Better to go with something you can rely on: introducing the Raspberry Pi Flash Drive, a compact high-capacity USB 3.0 USB‑A device with fast data transfer and an all‑aluminium enclosure. It’s available now at $30 for 128GB, or $55 for 256GB.

We’ve brought our usual exacting standards and attention to detail to our new accessory. It can sustain a write speed of 75MB/s (128GB variant) or 150MB/s (256GB variant), and our thorough testing has made sure it can handle the demands of real life when it comes to sudden disconnection and power failure. Its ergonomic all-aluminium enclosure is easy to grasp and almost impossible to break, although you’ll manage it if, like jdb of this parish, you go at it with a blowtorch. It has an attachment hole so you can keep it on a keyring or similar. The Raspberry Pi logo is etched with classy understatement onto its upper surface.

Fast and robust

Like many high-density NAND flash storage devices, the Raspberry Pi Flash Drive employs a small reservation of pseudo-SLC cache to improve performance under burst-y write workloads. In the background, any writes that were allocated in pSLC are streamed out to the higher-density, but slower, QLC flash. There are significant advantages to doing this: for short periods, the sequential write speed can be almost as fast as USB 3.0 will go.

This cache does, however, make benchmarking challenging. For this reason, the USB 3.0 performance figures we quote are sustained figures, where writes are measured when the cache is forced to do write‑through due to the volume of writes already committed, and reads are measured with the cache empty.

It goes without saying that whatever internal storage arrangement is used, it must be robust against surprise removal or power failure. We verified that our new flash drive meets this requirement over tens of thousands of random power cycles while running intermittently intensive I/O workloads.

Bonus features

In addition to being fast, we made sure that these drives support SSD-style SMART health reporting to help you to manage the device lifespan, as well as supporting TRIM operations. They will also autonomously enter low-power USB 3.0 states when idle.

More handy essentials from Raspberry Pi

Our new flash drive joins a growing range of rigorously specified and robustly tested Raspberry Pi accessories designed to make your day-to-day computing life as friction-free as possible. Raspberry Pi SD Cards and Raspberry Pi SSDs offer you a choice of storage solutions; the four-way Raspberry Pi USB 3 Hub provides an excellent alternative to unsatisfactory price/quality compromises elsewhere; and the Raspberry Pi Bumper is exactly what you need to protect the base and edges of your Raspberry Pi 5, without obstructing access to anything else.

The new Raspberry Pi Flash Drive gives you compact, portable storage with reliable performance for both 128GB and 256GB capacity options. Grab one from a Raspberry Pi Approved Reseller today.

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