Expensive flash drives: When and why it's worth paying more
News Computing Accessories Expensive flash drives: When and why it's worth paying more Faster transfers are only part of the story when you're deciding whether a premium flash drive is worth it. 17, 2026 8:00 am EST Valeriy Lushchikov/Getty Images Add Engadget on Google: Preferred Source Google Discover Flash drives aren't the first device you think about when considering the current sky-high cost of RAM and storage, but they've certainly been affected. Thanks to AI and data center demand, NAND flash prices have risen significantly.
- ▪News Computing Accessories Expensive flash drives: When and why it's worth paying more Faster transfers are only part of the story when you're deciding whether a premium flash drive is worth it.
- ▪17, 2026 8:00 am EST Valeriy Lushchikov/Getty Images Add Engadget on Google: Preferred Source Google Discover Flash drives aren't the first device you think about when considering the current sky-high cost of RAM and storage, but they've ce
- ▪Thanks to AI and data center demand, NAND flash prices have risen significantly.
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Story provenance
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Record
| Original publisher | Engadget |
| Canonical URL | https://www.engadget.com/2257443/when-why-pay-more-expensive-flash-drives/ |
| Publication time | Thu, 17 Sep 2026 12:00:00 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-09-17T12:03:44.723Z |
| Last seen | 2026-09-17T12:03:44.723Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | lhGnAd5lfV3f · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
News Computing Accessories Expensive flash drives: When and why it's worth paying more Faster transfers are only part of the story when you're deciding whether a premium flash drive is worth it. By Husain Parvez Sept. 17, 2026 8:00 am EST Valeriy Lushchikov/Getty Images Add Engadget on Google: Preferred Source Google Discover Flash drives aren't the first device you think about when considering the current sky-high cost of RAM and storage, but they've certainly been affected. Thanks to AI and data center demand, NAND flash prices have risen significantly. USB drives haven't absorbed those increases dollar for dollar, but cheap flash memory can no longer be taken for granted either. That makes the price difference between various flash drives more interesting.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Engadget.
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