Best Usb Flash Drives for DJs

Hello, today’s blog is about pen drives or flash drives. Specifically for DJs, but this blog is for everyone looking to buy their next pen drive or flash drive. And I’m gonna teach you how to choose the perfect drive for yourself. Let’s talk more about it. The most important tool or device for us DJs or anyone who needs a way to store and carry their files around. First, let me tell you how to choose the right pen drive. It all comes down to four important factors. Number one is convenience. That’s ease of use and connectivity options.

Number two is performance and speed. Of course, you need speed so that it can write and read faster. Number three is built quality. Of course, you need a pen drive that is made to last long so that you can plug in and plug out from multiple devices for a long time. And number four is brand. That is if it is reliable and it can provide support if required. Now after using a lot of pen drives, I’ve come up with a few of the best pen drive for you guys for most use cases. So, I’m going to give you my best recommendations today.

Go check it out. The first pen drive that I’m going to recommend today is this one here and it’s called the SanDisk Ultra Dual Drive Luxe. This specific one is a 128 GB with USB 3.1 speeds of up to 150 MB per second. This is my number one recommendation for a lot of reasons. Firstly, because of its convenience and this. It has both USB-A and USB-C connectors. And this for me is crucial as most laptops now have USB-C ports and if you’re a Mac user like me, you already know that Macs have only USB-C ports. And I hate having to use a dongle to connect my pen drive every time I want to use it with my laptop. So having both the ports in a pen drive makes it easy for me to connect this pen drive to the laptop, transfer the files and then go to the club and connect this to the USB-A port of the CBJs without ever having to use any dongles.

Now talking about the performance, I mentioned that this is a USB 3.1 pen drive and it has speeds of up to 150 MB per second. And that is the read speed. Here’s an attachment of the speed test of these drives from Blackmagic. Reading is how fast you can find the track and then bring it up when required and writing is how fast or how quickly it can transfer data from one place to another and that is writing. You need a perfect balance of both to be able to use a pen drive seamlessly and to call it a good performing pen drive. Now I can go technical and give you a lot of the stats and tell you what is better, what is not, but I’m not going to do it because I’m going to quickly tell you the easy way to know if you have a good pen drive or not.

And that is that you must choose either the USB 3.0, 3.1 or 3.2 pen drives. 3.2 being the most recent, but anywhere between 3, 3.1 should be more than enough in today’s use case. But the thumb rule is the higher the number, the faster the drive. The build quality is also nice. Yes, it is an all metal pen drive and it gets a little toasty but not so much. It is manageable. I’ve had this specific one for almost a year now and it has been absolutely brilliant so far. And SanDisk is a reliable brand. I’m not sponsored by SanDisk in any way. This is not a sponsored video. I’m just giving my recommendation based on my use case and I’ve been using these for at least three, four, five years now.

and if I remember, I’ve been using SanDisk for the longest time. Even my SSD is SanDisk and even the hard disk in my old laptop was Western Digital, which also is a same company. So these have been very reliable for me. So I’m just helping you guys choose the right one. I’m not sponsored by them. And it’s also smaller. I like using smaller pen drives because it eliminates the risk of getting damaged or getting knocked off by someone else while performing. So I personally like the smaller form factor pen drives and the Type-C port makes me future ready. They also have this plastic version which is cheaper and it also has a lot of color options but it is equally reliable and equally faster.

I use the second one as my backup drive. I always carry two pen drives whenever I’m performing just in case one stops working or if the link cable or the link port on one of the CDJs is damaged. I can always connect two pen drives to two different USBs to different ports on the CVJs and continue my performance. So these two pen drives will be my number one recommendation for most use cases. Now this next recommendation that I have is for people who know that they will never use a USB-C port or if they don’t have any devices that use a USB-C port. And it’s this one here, it’s called the SanDisk UltraFit pen drive. This was my most favorite pen drive until I got myself a Mac and moved to the Type-C port and I had to switch to a pen drive that has a USB Type-C port.

This drive is small and it’s very reliable. I’ve had this specific one for almost four years now. It had a different model earlier but now it comes in this non-breakable and heat resistant plastic which is extremely good and it has never failed on me. Go for this one if you’re looking for a small, reliable and fast pen drive. These two options in my testing proved to be the best overall performers for most use cases. One more pen drive or thumb drive that I would like to add is called the SanDisk ultra curve. This is a USB 3.2 pen drive, meaning it is faster of all the pen drives in the list today. And if you don’t like the small form factor of the ultra fit, then you can go for the ultra curve.

You get a slightly bigger pen drive, which is also faster. This again, only if you know that you will never need a USB-C port or never have to connect to a USB-C port, because if you do, then you will need a dongle to always connect that pen drive to a peripheral, which is only USB type C.