I'm surprised that the market for this is hot. Who is still buying USB sticks or SD cards? I haven't in quite a while, because I don't know who to trust anymore: cheaper variants are likely to be those counterfeits with hacked metadata that advertise having 4-10x the capacity they have[0], and more expensive ones are a crapshoot wrt. performance.

In recent years, for the occasional need to physically move some files, I've been using my phone as USB storage. Or, in the very rare case that isn't enough, a portable HDD or portable SSD drive.

EDIT: As mentioned in a reply, I still have a bunch of USB sticks I bought bought some 8-12 years ago, before counterfeiting was that big of a deal. In a very rare case I need to make a bootable drive, I reach into the desk drawer and dust one off.

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[0] - That's one of the nastiest form of fraud/counterfeiting I've ever experienced in the computing space. Less performant or even less functional hardware is one thing, but a 256 MB USB stick that pretends to be a 4 GB one will happily accept the first few files a typical user would put on it, lulling them into false sense of security, and then silently drop everything that's over 256 MB - a fact the user would only discover when trying to read back the data they "stored" on the USB stick, often days later, long after deleting the original files. I imagine it still beats ransomware on the metric of "priceless photos of loved ones forever lost, because some asshole thought they found a clever way to make money".

> I don't know who to trust anymore: cheaper variants are likely to be those counterfeits with hacked metadata that advertise having 4-10x the capacity they have[0], and more expensive ones are a crapshoot wrt. performance.

You can validate flash media with f3[1] on Linux/Mac or H2testw on Windows. These tools will fill up the drive with data, then verify that it all reads back properly. This ensures the drive meets the rated capacity and doubles as a sequential read/write test.

1: https://github.com/AltraMayor/f3