Best Buy has discounted the SanDisk Ultra 256GB USB 3.0 flash drive again—the price is currently down to $55. The company claims this deal is $145 off the sticker price, but that’s not quite accurate. That may have been its original price, but several online retailers are selling this storage drive for about $68.
Still, $55 is a good price for a healthy amount of storage you can slip onto your keyring. This thumb drive is a standard USB Type-A device, and not the newer and faster Type-C. Though that’s a good thing at this stage of the game, as USB-C is far from universal. The Type-A port also retracts so you can carry an even more compact device when you need to.
The drive comes with SanDisk’s SecureAccess software that provides 128-bit AES encryption for those who need it. Personally, I’m not a fan of onboard software on a thumb drive and try to blow it out when I can. It’s not clear if you can do that with this drive.
As for speeds, SanDisk says it has a read speed of 100 megabytes per second, but several reviews around the web say its write speed is a good deal slower than that. That said, if you don’t need blazing fast transfers and want a large amount of storage for as little cash as possible, this thumb drive is a solid choice.
SanDisk