Are Flash Drives still relevant in 2025? PNY seems to think so.

It was only a few days ago that my keyring broke and I had to remove everything on it to replace it – My car key, assortment of house, shed, and storage keys, a bottle opener, a flight tag, and an old Samsung BAR Metal USB Stick. The flight tag, bottle opener, and USB didn’t make the cut in being re-added to the ring, mostly to keep down bulk, but because of lack of use. PNY’s latest product might bring storage back to my keychain.

PNY today unvailed their latest in USB Sticks with their new DUO Link V3 assortment; a Premium metal, USB 3.2 dual Type-C and Type-A Flash Drive for both mobile and compute devices.

The original requirement for a USB on my keychain was for moving data between a device I own, and either a work device, or ‘closed’ network (Often just for printing documents or posters at Officeworks, or photos at Harvey Norman) and so the USB-A drive recently-removed was perfect for my day to day.

USB-C is a key requirement today, especially with every Apple device now USB-C only – An issue I remember when I had to transfer from a Mac to PC, and had to fish around the drawers for an adapter to copy a file over. The PNY Flash Drive makes this easy with a quick swivel to your chosen port.

Nowadays my workflow is usually cloud-based, removing any port-specific hinderances – Steam lets me share games across my network, with my photos and documents backed up to Google Drive. These are ususally pretty quick to upload on one device, and download on another. Copying a 100GB Steam game would still be faster with PNY’s latest stick with up to 1,000MB/s read and up to 800MB/s write speeds; quicker than a typical ethernet transfer on Steam.

Price-wise, how does it compare?

The two main brand contenders in the market are still SanDisk and Lexar for the Metal Dual USB options, comparing them to PNY:

Value for speed? The PNY Flash Drive comes out on top with MSRP, and even with some current sale prices on Amazon, are still competitive and better value than Sandisk and Lexar.

With the metal build, speed, and value, the PNY DUO Link V3 might just make it back onto my keychain very soon. Now to just find a replacement bottle opener.