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ZDNET’s key takeaways
- A compact yet stylish flash drive that comes in two capacities.
- Decent performance and support for SMART and TRIM.
- While nice, this is not an essential accessory for most Raspberry Pi users.
The Raspberry Pi Foundation has released yet another accessory for the Raspberry Pi platform, this time in the form of a storage accessory. The Flash Drive is, as the name suggests, a flash drive that plugs into the Pi.
The drives support SMART (Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology), allowing users to keep an eye on possible failures, and the TRIM command to improve performance and extend lifespan.
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The drives come in two capacities — 128GB and 256GB — and support a USB 3.0 Gen 1×1 interface with a Type-A connector, and are fully backward compatible with USB 2.0. The drives are encased in an all-aluminum shell that is both tough and acts as a heatsink to dissipate excess heat, and have a hole on the end for a lanyard.
Performance is dependent on capacity:
128GB capacity
- 16k IOPS (4kB random reads)
- 21k IOPS (4kB random writes)
- 75MB/s sequential write speed (sustained)
256GB capacity
- 18k IOPS (4kB random reads)
- 22k IOPS (4kB random writes)
- 150MB/s sequential write speed (sustained)
While the Flash Drive is aimed at Raspberry Pi boards that have USB-A ports, this can be used with the Raspberry Pi Zero using an OTG shim.
The Raspberry Pi USB 3 Hub is a great way to attach more devices to your Pi.
Raspberry Pi Foundation/ZDNET
Want to connect a lot of drives to your Pi? You need the $15 Raspberry Pi USB 3 Hub that has four downstream USB 3.0 Type-A ports, offers data transfer speeds up to 5 Gb/s, and can draw up to 4.5W of power from the host Raspberry Pi, or it can make use of an optional USB-C power input, which increases the power to 15W.
As well as acting as storage for a Raspberry Pi, this drive can also be used like any other regular USB flash drive.
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What’s wrong with using a microSD card like you’ve always done? Well, the truth is that for most users, the microSD card will still suffice, but there are plenty of times when juggling those little cards becomes a pain, and the convenience of a drive with USB 3.0 support wins over messing with a tiny storage card and card readers.
There’s also a performance boost. While microSD cards on the Raspberry Pi 5 can deliver around 5,000/2,000 IOPS of random read and write performance, respectively, and sustained write speeds around the 30 MB/s mark, these flash drives easily blow past this. On the Raspberry Pi 4, microSD card performance is much lower because of a slower card slot.
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What about using any old USB 3 drive? Well, that is a valid point, and there are certainly drives out there in a similar ballpark in terms of performance, but these have not been built and tested to work with the Raspberry Pi platform.
The 128GB Raspberry Pi Flash Drive is $30, while the 256GB version is $50. As far as stock goes, only CanaKit had stock at the time of writing. The Raspberry Pi Foundation has confirmed that the Flash Drive will be in production until 2030.