Which is the best USB Stick for using on CDJs today?
Which is the best USB Stick for using on CDJs today?
Any usb stick formatted in FAT32 which is big enough to hold your tunes really. I have one of these - Kingston DT101G2/16GB-AMZ DataTraveler 101 G2 16 GB USB Flash Drive, Black : Amazon.co.uk: Computers & Accessories - and it works perfectly.
These are the only USB sticks I ever use. No chance of bumping into or breaking one of these bad boys:
I’ve got bloodly loads of 'em… They’re the only ones I’ll buy now.
I haven’t used 'em on a CDJ, but I imagne CDJ users have had issues with bumping USB sticks that poke out too far. That won’t happen with these.
If you transfer playlists to USB regularly, look for something with a decent write speed. Many of the cheap+small drives only copy at 2-3 MB/sec.
Do you know some that have high writing speeds? Cause it is the only thing I take to gigs besides the headphones, I want to have the best
Yeah, but try to find one of those after dropping it in a dark dj booth while being drunk 
Amazon usually has benchmark speeds quoted for the more popular sticks, either in the product images or the customer reviews.
So brutal.
keep 2 more in your pocket, they are getting cheaper every day.
I used to use these for my cdj850s, but ditched them because they took forever to load with tunes from rekordbox (via macbook air). Very slow write times, but they are very convenient and look very sleek when plugged in.
I picked up a couple kingston data travelers instead, which seem to be a slight improvement on write speeds and look equally as sleek when plugged into the 850s.
i’ve actually been on the hunt for some faster sticks, but i’m not sure they exist in USB2.0 format, so the kingstons will work for now.
also, to elaborate on this… ALWAYS keep at least 1 back up USB stick, identical to the other one or two, depending on your players. I tend to bring 3 sticks with me whenever i play out.
Also, dont forget that some players require 2 usb drives, such as the cdj850s and 350s, as opposed to the one drive needed for the 2000s and 900s
If you dig through the customer reviews, you can usually find read/write speed for sticks on both USB 3.0 and 2.0 ports.
This one for example seems to have a decent write speed over USB2, as do most other fast USB3 sticks.
^ What’s peoples opinions on the Kingston Data Traveller. I want to grab a few but not sure. Need something with a good write speed and not bulky and they seem decent from reviews!
I know writing speed affects the time you spend exporting tracks to the USB Stick. But what about the reading speed? Does it make a high-loaded USB Stick to react quicker when in a CDJ? In other words, can reading speed make a high-performance USB Stick with 100Gb of music work faster on a CDJ than a low-performance one with 10Gb?
The reading speed of USB 2.0 already allows more headroom than required to load data from a single USB to 4 CDJs simultaneously, having a fast USB 3.0 device won’t speed this up (I read this from an official Pioneer representative on the Pioneer DJ forums but can’t find the link to back up the claim >.<).
I highly recommend the Sandisk Extreme USB 3.0 memory sticks:
They have ridiculously high read/write speeds for a USB device, allowing you to transfer your music to the USB really quickly. I copied an entire 64gb collection of music onto mine in around 25-30 minutes. A word of caution though, to benefit from the increased speeds of USB 3.0 you need to make sure you have a USB 3.0 port!
+1 for Sandisk Extreme sticks. They’re much faster than almost any other USB 3.0 stick out there (100-180 MB/sec), and also perform really well through USB 2.0 ports (30MB/sec vs the 3-4MB/sec of cheap sticks).
Devices with better read speed will load up tracks faster on the CDJ.
Not putting a USB 3.0 drive on the nexus was some real lack of initiative from Pioneer. It would have put the cost of production up by a tiny fraction and it would have suited the long game definitely.
Although it was probably done on purpose so they can release the nexus MkII in white with a USB 3 port.
Ain’t dat cute!