Good news: you can pick up a 1TB USB-C flash drive for $80 (33% off)
Bad news: this deal ends in six hours, which seems like a lot of pressure.
Kingston's 1TB DataTraveler Max USB-C flash drive is an unusual beastie, matching NVMe-SSD-grade speeds with a slim, portable flash drive form factor. This drive is capable of reads up to 1000MB/s, putting it alongside some of the best external SSDs, and it's currently discounted at B&H Photo Video to $80 for a 1TB size - not bad!
Unfortunately this deal is only live for the next six hours, so I hope that you see this post in time!
With that urgency in mind then, let me quickly run you through the relevant specs. With 900MB/s writes and 1000MB/s reads, this is about half the speed of the very fastest external SSDs, such as the WD P40 and Kingston XS2000, but just as fast as the rugged Samsung T7. Looking at those competitors online, the DataTraveler Max is cheaper by a significant margin - the P40 is $117, the XS2000 is $100 and the Samsung T7 is... also $100. That makes the DataTraveler a cool $20 cheaper - pretty reasonable!
To make full use of the drive, you'll need to use with a USB port that meets the "USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-C" standard, which is a very fancy way of saying it has to be a 10Gbs port - fairly standard for motherboards and laptops made over the last few years.
There's no information on the drive's random speeds, which are a good indicator of game or OS load time performance, so I would guess that these would be worse than the physically larger external SSDs that we've actually tested mentioned above. That means I only feel confident recommending this a super-fast drive for archival and transport purposes, rather than a drive you can play games from directly (no doubt less demanding games would run from the DataTraveler Max without issue, but I'm not sure if that would extend to AAA games without testing it.)
In any case, depending on your use case this could be a pretty sweet way to save $20 over the alternatives and get a drive that's more portable too. Let me know what you make of it in the comments below, and stay tuned for another deal very shortly!
