You can get 3TB external hard drives – with 12 times more storage space – for similar prices. Even 256GB flash drives often cost in excess of £70, and can cost far more than that. Unfortunately, that would increase the cost dramatically.

Obviously, it would be better to use a USB 3.0 flash drive, which can read data at 100MBps or more. Speed does make a difference to usability, which is why people are moving to SSDs (~5x faster than HDDs) and M.2 drives (~25x faster than HDDs). It’s a lot slower than your 1TB hard drive (88.80/82.08), which is somewhat slower than mine (127.7/122.6).

That’s middle-of-the-road for a USB 2.0 device, where the fastest can manage about 25MBps reading and 10MBps writing data. (On this benchmark, MBps means one million bytes per second.) You very helpfully ran CrystalDiskMark when I asked, and it put the read speed at 16.28MBps and the write speed at 6.52MBps. If your 1TB Flash drive reliably holds 1TB for a year or two, then it’s unlikely to be fast.

Windows on flash drive