How to guarantee a genuine USB pen drive?

JustAnotherSaver

Thanks for the info.

I was looking at a larger one and was about to buy off Amazon until I saw it wasn't sold by Amazon.

Had a look at the website you mentioned. I'm guessing you've just been real lucky based on these reviews.

forgotmyname

They have not tweaked the file sizes and cluster sizes. Easy to fidge the test results with a little tweaking
of the settings.

Card slow at transferring lots of small files, set it to transfer a larger file instead.  Someone complaining their
USB 3 stick is super slow when they have it plugged into a USB 1 socket or there is a 10ft USB extension.

SteveSi

There are two gotchas to consider with USB drives (apart from price and reliability).
1. Fake drives - e.g. these report to any operating system as a 32GB but actually contain only say 8GB of memory. They won't format at NTFS  and so are usually shipped as a FAT32 volume. Once you fill them past 8GB your files will become corrupt. Use FakeFlashTest.exe to test any new SD flash card (with USB adapter) or USB pen drive.
2. Speed - some USB drives are advertised with very fast read speeds. These drives are often optimised for fast bulk data transfer operations. They are fine if you intend to store only large files on them. However, if you intend to store hundreds/thousands of small files on it (and want fast performance) then you need to study the 4K random I/O rd/wr benchmark timings which are never published by the manufacturers! For instance, extracting all files from an XP ISO file which contains thousands of small files took 45 minutes on a fast USB 3 Lexar P20 drive, but took only 75 seconds on a 'slower' SanDisk Extreme (which had almost half the mfr quoted speeds). So you can't simply compare the manufacturers quoted read/write speeds because these are the sequential 'large packet' speeds whereas files are typically written and read in 4K blocks.
Check https://usb.userbenchmark.com/  for the Peak 4K write speeds of any drive you are considering (or run CrystalDiskMark on any drive you already own to test it).  1MB/s is just about acceptable.

P.S. Most SD card readers fitted in laptops and some PCs are very, very slow. If testing the speed of your SD cards, you need to buy a fast USB 3 SD card reader/adapter (they are quite cheap).

SteveSi

If you are looking for a fast, reliable USB 3 drive, then I recommend the SanDisk Extreme Pro range. It has a retractable USB connector so no cap to lose, is fast and made of metal.
A cheaper fast drive is the Transcend JetFlash 920 (not extensively tested for reliability but it's lasted 9 months so far). It has a cap which is easy to lose.
Another is the Corsair Voyager GTX USB 3 which is older but pretty fast and appears as a fixed disk (i.e. local disk) rather than a Removable (USB) disk in Windows. Always remember to click on system tray 'safely Remove' under Windows or use 'Eject' on Linux systems.