Fast and Sturdy: Raspberry Pi Expands Into USB Flash Drives

Raspberry Pi is best known for its low-cost custom computers. But the company also wants fans to consider buying USB thumb drives.

On Thursday, the company expanded into selling Raspberry Pi-branded USB 3.0 flash drives, starting at $30. That’s pricier than your average USB stick, but it promises better performance and durability.

“For basics like these, it’s tempting to reach for the cheapest thing on Amazon or whatever you find in your local supermarket,” Raspberry Pi says in a blog post. “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.”

Simply called the Raspberry Pi Flash Drive, the product is available for $30 for the 128GB version and $55 for the 256GB model. That’s about double the price you’ll find on Amazon for cheaper USB sticks. However, Raspberry Pi says its product comes in a sleek “all-alumnium enclosure,” which promises to be nearly impossible to break.

(Credit: Raspberry Pi)

The 128GB version can also sustain a 75MB per second data transfer speed while the 256GB model can reach 150 MB/s. The products can even hit higher speeds in short bursts, thanks to a “small reservation of pseudo-SLC cache to improve performance,” the company says.  

“This cache does, however, make benchmarking challenging. For this reason, the USB 3.0 performance figures we quote are sustained figures,” Raspberry Pi adds. 

The other perk is how the drives support “S.M.A.R.T.” health reporting, giving you a way to monitor the product’s lifespan. Each USB drive is designed for a USB Type A connector. The drives also come with a hole attachment that can be used to hook to a keyring or chain. 

(Credit: Raspberry Pi)

“And our thorough testing has made sure it can handle the demands of real life when it comes to sudden disconnection and power failure,” the blog post adds. “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.”

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