best USB 3.0 flash drive? for podcast listening in car

[ZaphodsCloset]

What do you think is the best flash drive for mp3 playback? Needs to be Linux (me) and OS (him) compatible.

BF has a really long commute, so I'm DLing various podcasts that might amuse him. His car stereo has a USB port and should be able to play from a flash drive.

 

[wyverary]

Any thumb drive of sufficient storage capacity should do it. You don't need anything fancy, and they're a dime a dozen these days.

 

[Judge]

Why not go by customer comments? Of course you have to them with a grain of salt to some degree. But at least you can get real feedback on specific brands.

USB Flash Drives, USB Thumb Drives - Newegg.com

 

[apt-get]

What do you think is the best flash drive for mp3 playback?

Honestly, any should do. The read speed for USB 3.0 drives is of order of magnitude 100 MB/s. Songs that are encoded as 320 kpbs are usually about 1 MB per minute of song length, which means that the minimum read speed required for playback would be about 0.01 MB/s. A USB 2.0 (read speed ~10 MB/s) reads data about 1000 times as fast as data needs to be read for playback, and it's about 10000 times the speed required for USB 3.0. Storage space, price, and longevity should be the factors you care about.

Needs to be Linux (me) and OS (him) compatible.

BF has a really long commute, so I'm DLing various podcasts that might amuse him. His car stereo has a USB port and should be able to play from a flash drive.

In that case, what matters is that once you purchase the drive, you format it to use the FAT32 filesystem, and really, this can be done with any USB drive. FAT32 is a terrible filesystem, but both OS X and Linux can read/write to it, and I'm willing to bet that the car's stereo will require the drive to be formatted with that filesystem.