Raspberry Pi Hits the Own-Brand Storage Trifecta, Adds USB Flash Drives to Its SSDs and microSDs

Raspberry Pi has made the next logical leap in own-brand storage, following the launch of its branded microSD cards and solid-state drives (SSDs) — by releasing branded USB flash drives, too.

"A USB flash drive is one of those small essentials you reach for from time to time to back up data or transfer files between your Raspberry Pi and substitute computers," Raspberry Pi's Helen Lynn writes of the new hardware. "For basics like these, it's tempting to reach for the cheapest thing on Amazon or whatever you find in your local supermarket, but you can easily end up with a device that has sluggish read and write speeds, fragile casing, or – worst of all – far less storage capacity than it claims. Better to go with something you can rely on: introducing the Raspberry Pi Flash Drive, a compact high-capacity USB 3.0 USB [Type]‑A device with fast data transfer and an all‑aluminum enclosure."

The new drives are available in 128GB and 256GB sizes, with a claimed 75MB/s and 150MB/s sustained write performance respectively. In terms of random input/output performance, a more important metric for those planning to use on as a drive to host their Raspberry Pi's operating system, the 128GB model offers a claimed 16k read and 21k write 4kB random input/output operations per second (IOPS) with the 256GB model increasing this slightly to 18k IOPS read and 22k IOPS write performance. Both use a USB 3.0 Gen 1×1 interface with a Type-A connector, support the USB Attached SCSI (UAS) protocol with a fallback to the older USB Mass Storage (USM) standard, support SMART health monitoring and reporting, and offer U1/U2 idle power saving modes.

The launch comes shortly after the company launched the Raspberry Pi AI HAT+ 2, a low-power Hailo-10H accelerator that offers support for running computer vision and machine learning workloads but ties up the Raspberry Pi 5's only user-accessible PCI Express (PCIe) lane — meaning it can't be used at the same time as an M.2 HAT with high-performance Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe) storage. The new USB drives can connect to one of the Raspberry Pi 5's USB 3.0 ports and be used as either data storage or as a bootable drive for the operating system, and in the case of the 256GB model should offer improved performance over even a top-end microSD card.

The Raspberry Pi Flash Drives are available to order from official resellers today, priced at $30 for the 128GB model and $55 for the 256GB variant; the company has not shared data on write longevity nor mean time between failures.