Is there much difference in the [branded] memory sticks?

B0bbyEwing

The wife was asking about a USB-C memory stick. Has to be C for what she wants.

Had a gander on Amazon & saw a bit of a range in the 256GB variants.

£25.89 Samsung
£20.99 SanDisk
£14.88 Kingston
£13.99 Acer

The Samsung is nearly twice the price of the Kingston but all 3 are well known brands. Any particular reason to pick either of the dearer two over the much cheaper Kingston or Acer?

Exodi

This question is awkwardly framed.

In isolation, there is no difference between slapping a brand name on a memory stick. However, there are differences between the specifications of different memory sticks.

One of the main being read/write speed. It's all good focusing on the capacity on a memory stick, but there's nothing worse than waiting all day for your photos to backup.

Using the ones you linked as an example:

Samsung has read speed of 400MB/s and write speed of 30MB/s
SanDisk has read speed of 400MB/s and write speed of ~150MB/s
Kingston has read speed of ~100MB/s and write speed of ~10MB/s
Acer has read speed of 120MB/S and write speed of 90MB/s

As you can see in the above, while the Kingston and Acer are cheaper, they also have lower read/write speeds (especially the Kingston, that write speed is shocking).

Based on this, of the examples you linked, the SanDisk looks like the best deal.

Kingston do manufacture fast memory sticks - their DataTraveler Max is one of the fastest memory sticks on the market: http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B09DVPH8NQ

£33.99 but read speed of 1000MB/s and write speed of 900MB/s. There are some criticisms on the quality though.

Anyway, hope that helps.

Neil_Jones

For the most part on these you're paying for the name which is pretty par for the course for most Samsung products, even if they are mostly worth the extra expense.  However whether its worth it for a USB stick is probably debatable, most of these things are generally mass made in different packaging.

Never had a problem with Kingston anything and I've had various guises and sizes over the years, I've still got a 128Mb (yes, 128 Megabytes, not 128 Gigabytes!) that still works.

MikeJXE

FWIW I always buy SanDisk and never had a problem 

B0bbyEwing

Thanks for the information.

Its use will be my wife going to a concert & having a concern she's going to fill up her phone storage with pictures & videos and have no space to take more.

Having never been to a concert I can't relate. I can't understand why you'd want to record so much of something that you'll probably never look back on rather than just watch it but hey ho each to their own & just because I wouldn't doesn't mean others wont. There will be 2 concerts over 2 days I think.

So she was looking at a USB-C memory stick to transfer files to to free up space & give her more space to take more photos/videos.

In this instance what would you opt for? As the numbers are pretty meaningless to me. I can see that A is faster than B which is faster than C but how that translates in to usefulness for this scenario I don't really know to be honest.

35har1old

Exodi said:

This question is awkwardly framed.

In isolation, there is no difference between slapping a brand name on a memory stick. However, there are differences between the specifications of different memory sticks.

One of the main being read/write speed. It's all good focusing on the capacity on a memory stick, but there's nothing worse than waiting all day for your photos to backup.

Using the ones you linked as an example:

Samsung has read speed of 300MB/s and write speed of 30MB/s
SanDisk has read speed of 400MB/s and write speed of ~150MB/s
Kingston has read speed of ~100MB/s and write speed of ~10MB/s
Acer has read speed of 120MB/S and write speed of 90MB/s

As you can see in the above, while the Kingston and Acer are cheaper, they also have lower read/write speeds (especially the Kingston, that write speed is shocking).

Based on this, of the examples you linked, the SanDisk looks like the best deal.

Kingston do manufacture fast memory sticks - their DataTraveler Max is one of the fastest memory sticks on the market: http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B09DVPH8NQ

£33.99 but read speed of 1000MB/s and write speed of 900MB/s. There are some criticisms on the quality though.

Anyway, hope that helps.

Samsung is 400MB/s read 5 year guarantee?
Better of with a ssd if you want speed

HillStreetBlues

You could go for a duel SanDisk for £18.31 https://www.amazon.co.uk/SanDisk-all-metal-reversible-connectors-smartphones/dp/B0CLBPH2Q9

jshm2

B0bbyEwing said:

The wife was asking about a USB-C memory stick. Has to be C for what she wants.

Had a gander on Amazon & saw a bit of a range in the 256GB variants.

£25.89 Samsung
£20.99 SanDisk
£14.88 Kingston
£13.99 Acer

The Samsung is nearly twice the price of the Kingston but all 3 are well known brands. Any particular reason to pick either of the dearer two over the much cheaper Kingston or Acer?

Yes just as there is a difference between cars - despite them being similar engine sizes.

I wouldn't use Ebay or Amazon to buy memory sticks though - too many fakes. Try mymemory or even Argos instead. 

The difference is usually speed and cache, but often it's just design of the stick.  . 

flaneurs_lobster

B0bbyEwing said:

Thanks for the information.

Its use will be my wife going to a concert & having a concern she's going to fill up her phone storage with pictures & videos and have no space to take more.

Having never been to a concert I can't relate. I can't understand why you'd want to record so much of something that you'll probably never look back on rather than just watch it but hey ho each to their own & just because I wouldn't doesn't mean others wont. There will be 2 concerts over 2 days I think.

So she was looking at a USB-C memory stick to transfer files to to free up space & give her more space to take more photos/videos.

In this instance what would you opt for? As the numbers are pretty meaningless to me. I can see that A is faster than B which is faster than C but how that translates in to usefulness for this scenario I don't really know to be honest.

Apologies if this has all been checked out - how is your wife planning to transfer photos/videos from her phone to the USB stick? 

It MAY be as simple as plugging the stick into the phone and selecting the files to move or maybe not. 

Just be sure to dry run the procedure before the concert. 

It might be possible to backup the photos/videos in real time to your usual cloud backup service, this is usually defaulted to only happen when the phone is connected by Wi-fi because shunting media over mobile data will chew through your data allowance and won't help battery life but it's an option (but only in addition to your hardware solution).

B0bbyEwing

flaneurs_lobster said:

B0bbyEwing said:

Thanks for the information.

Its use will be my wife going to a concert & having a concern she's going to fill up her phone storage with pictures & videos and have no space to take more.

Having never been to a concert I can't relate. I can't understand why you'd want to record so much of something that you'll probably never look back on rather than just watch it but hey ho each to their own & just because I wouldn't doesn't mean others wont. There will be 2 concerts over 2 days I think.

So she was looking at a USB-C memory stick to transfer files to to free up space & give her more space to take more photos/videos.

In this instance what would you opt for? As the numbers are pretty meaningless to me. I can see that A is faster than B which is faster than C but how that translates in to usefulness for this scenario I don't really know to be honest.

Apologies if this has all been checked out - how is your wife planning to transfer photos/videos from her phone to the USB stick? 

It MAY be as simple as plugging the stick into the phone and selecting the files to move or maybe not. 

Just be sure to dry run the procedure before the concert. 

It might be possible to backup the photos/videos in real time to your usual cloud backup service, this is usually defaulted to only happen when the phone is connected by Wi-fi because shunting media over mobile data will chew through your data allowance and won't help battery life but it's an option (but only in addition to your hardware solution).

Not sure to be honest.

I know a chap at work brought a USB-C drive in, plugged it in to my phone, went in to files, copied the file I wanted to my downloads folder, 5 seconds later it was done. 


I assume you could do the reverse? 

Although wife is with iPhone I'm with Samsung so maybe this scuppers her idea or not I don't know. 

flaneurs_lobster

B0bbyEwing said:

Not sure to be honest.

I know a chap at work brought a USB-C drive in, plugged it in to my phone, went in to files, copied the file I wanted to my downloads folder, 5 seconds later it was done. 


I assume you could do the reverse? 

Although wife is with iPhone I'm with Samsung so maybe this suppers her idea or not I don't know. 

It might be exactly this simple. That's the point, until you try it out it you can't be sure.

There's bound to be dozens of videos on YouTube no doubt describing exactly what you want to do (if you can find them). Still wouldn't assume it'll be OK until I had shifted photos & video off the phone and onto another device (laptop?) via the memory stick and made sure that they opened/played OK.

Particularly important if you are documenting a one-off like a concert.