Modern flash drives have USB 2.0 connectivity. However, they do not currently use the full 480 Mbit/s the specification supports due to technical limitations inherent in NAND flash. The fastest drives currently available use a dual channel controller, although they still fall considerably short of the transfer rate possible from a current generation hard disk, or the maximum high speed USB throughput.

Typical overall file transfer speeds are about 3 MB/s. The highest current overall file transfer speeds are about 10-30 MB/s. Older, "full speed" 12 Mbit/s devices are limited to a maximum of about 1 MB/s.

USB supports three data rates:

• A Low Speed (1.1, 2.0) rate of 1.5 Mbit/s (187 kB/s) that is mostly used for Human Interface Devices (HID) such as keyboards, mice, and joysticks.
• A Full Speed (1.1, 2.0) rate of 12 Mbit/s (1.5 MB/s). Full Speed was the fastest rate before the USB 2.0 specification and many devices fall back to Full Speed. Full Speed devices divide the USB bandwidth between them in a first-come first-served basis and it is not uncommon to run out of bandwidth with several devices. All USB Hubs support Full Speed.
• A Hi-Speed (2.0) rate of 480 Mbit/s (60 MB/s).
  
  

USB mass-storage

A flash drive, a typical USB mass-storage device.

USB implements connections to storage devices using a set of standards called the USB mass storage device class (referred to as MSC or UMS). This was initially intended for traditional magnetic and optical drives, but has been extended to support a wide variety of devices, particularly flash drives, which have replaced floppy disks for data transport. Though most computers are capable of booting off of USB Mass Storage devices, USB is not intended to be a primary bus for a computer's internal storage: buses such as ATA (IDE), Serial ATA (SATA), and SCSI fulfill that role.

However, USB has one important advantage in that it is possible to install and remove devices without opening the computer case, making it useful for external drives. Originally conceived and still used today for optical storage devices (CD-RW drives, DVD drives, etc.), a number of manufacturers offer external portable USB hard drives, or empty enclosures for drives, that offer performance comparable to internal drives. These external drives usually contain a translating device that interfaces a drive of conventional technology (IDE, ATA, SATA, ATAPI, or even SCSI) to a USB port. Functionally, the drive appears to the user just like another internal drive. Other competing standards that allow for external connectivity are eSATA.