Are Mini USB Drives Better Than Thumb Drives?

Storage drives come in all shapes and sizes. They come in bricks and candy bar-style shapes similar to phones; they come in rugged, credit card-sized forms; and they come as portable thumb drives. They also have a variety of other form factors, including slim, mini, and so on. For a long time, thumb drives have been the go-to for portability. Thumb drives are your average USB stick, pen drive, or USB flash drive, and flash drives are an overall category that includes any storage device using flash memory. To make things more confusing, mini drives are tiny flash drives — that look like a very short USB stick — with capacities of 64 GB and higher, some even in the terabyte range.

Examples of mini drives include the Samsung Fit Plus series, the PNY Elite-X Fit series, the Sandisk Ultra Fit, and the Sandisk Extreme Fit. They're much smaller than the common USB thumb drive, about a third of the size in most cases, while still offering large storage capacities for something so tiny. But are they better or worse than ordinary (larger) thumb drives? Well, that's a tough question to answer, because it depends. At large capacities, they're more expensive than most thumb drives.

They're smaller and more portable, which is great for travel, but not so great for keeping them safe. The point of this miniature form factor is that they're meant to be plugged into a computer or device for data backup and, ultimately, stay there. You would leave a mini drive plugged into your laptop even while stowing it in your backpack or handbag, for example. Are they better for storage, though?

What truly sets mini drives apart is their much smaller profile. A traditional thumb drive is already portable, but mini drives take that a step further. Because they're so small and plentiful, there's simply no need for traditional USB flash drives anymore in many cases. You'd be surprised how many benefits are offered by the smaller size alone.

Like traditional drives, mini drives have large capacities, so you can use them as a backup hard drive. 64GB, 128GB, 256GB, sometimes over 1TB — it's a lot of space to backup files. But the smaller form factor lends to more unique uses. For example, you could leave them plugged into your laptop at all times rather than taking them out. Many of them also offer fast transfer speeds, so you're not waiting long for files to copy, as long as you use the right USB port. The Samsung Fit Plus 256GB has an advertised read speed of 400MB/s, and write speed of 110MB/s when plugged into a USB 3.2 Gen1 port. At max speeds, it would take you a few seconds to move a 1GB file onto or off the drive. You may not get the max speeds, but the data transfer is still fast and that's the point. They're tiny but capable.

Several mini drives even have a USB Type-C connector rather than USB-A, so you can plug them right into your phone and say goodbye to deleting old photos. Back them up anytime, anywhere. That said, mini drives can be easy to lose, which is a problem if you store sensitive data on them. Whether that's worth the additional cost or makes them better than a standard thumb drive is ultimately for you to decide.