Thumb flash drives.. varying prices?

[poodlesrule]

I am shopping for a (very) small capacity flash thumb drive to gather the music tutorial material I accumulated.
It looks like the prices vary quite a bit, for the same capacity drives.

Is is just a matter of pricing the fast access time drives higher?
Better internal "construction"?

Actually, access time isn't an issue for my application.

[marnold]

I haven't done a ton of research, but I know that one thing that makes SD cards, et al, more expensive is writing speed in particular and overall speed in general.

[bcdon]

Just buy the largest capacity drive at the cheapest price. Don't worry about claimed speeds because USB drives are slow. If you don't plan to run your operating system off the flash disk, speed doesn't matter too much anyhow.

I'm sure you can find better deals/sales but this should give you some idea.

http://shop1.outpost.com/search?search_type=regular&sqxts=1&query_string=Lexar&cat=

$9.99 Lexar JumpDrive Retrax 4GB USB Flash Drive
$19.99 Lexar JumpDrive Retrax 8GB USB Flash Drive
$39.99 Lexar JumpDrive Retrax 16GB USB Flash Drive

[bcdon]

I haven't done a ton of research, but I know that one thing that makes SD cards, et al, more expensive is writing speed in particular and overall speed in general.
Writing takes longer because of the FLASH chips. When a write is done to a block, if it already contains data, even just a byte, it has to be erased first. One way to get faster write times is for the controller to have a cache, so when you write it goes to fast(er)-ram cache before the flash controller commits it to FLASH.

[Bloozcat]

The first one I bought was a SansDisc that was on sale, cheap, cheap at Office Depot, I think. It works just fine so I just watch the Sunday paper for the add specials at all the local office/computer supply places and buy the SansDiscs when they're on sale. They really can get cheap, especially for the capacity you can get.

[Eric]

Just buy the largest capacity drive at the cheapest price. Don't worry about claimed speeds because USB drives are slow. If you don't plan to run your operating system off the flash disk, speed doesn't matter too much anyhow.
This has been my experience too. I find that they are slowly replacing pens as giveaways in some cases, so maybe you can find a free one (<= 1GB) if you really don't need much capacity.