Our favorite 2TB SSD stick hits an all-time low — keep all your schoolwork backed up and in your backpack with this back-to-school deal

It's getting closer and closer to heading off to, or back to, school or college. You no doubt have a checklist of essential items to procure before then, but is a flash drive one of them? Easily overlooked, a flash drive can be an essential device for backing up, storing, or transporting your schoolwork and other valuable data around campus. Cloud backup and local machine backups are standard requirements, too, but when it comes to your most important data, the more redundancy the better.

The SK hynix Tube T31 is a pretty hefty flash drive as far as flash drives go. Its capacity and speeds can rival that of a standard M.2 SSD (see our benchmarking tests and review), and for a limited time, you can pick up the 2TB SK hynix Tube T31 for $127.99, its lowest ever price.

• Check out the deal at Amazon

The SK hynix Tube T31 2TB uses its impressive performance to blur the lines between external SSDs and flash drives in terms of both speed and capacity. The Tube T31 uses its ultra-compatible USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-A connector for easy connection to any device with a USB-A port and makes use of the full 10Gbps data bandwidth available to give speeds of up to 1,000MB/s when transferring your data.

We used the DiskBench storage benchmarking tool to test real-world file transfer performance with a custom 50GB dataset. We copy 4,617 files (images, videos, and software ISO files) to a folder on the test drive (write). Then, after leaving the system idle for five minutes, we run the same test in reverse, moving the test folder to a different location on our PCIe 4.0 testing drive. The SK hynix Tube 31 performed well, with the results landing it at the top of our chart for this particular test.

We had the chance to review the SK hynix Tube T31 and gave it an Editor's Choice award for its outstanding performance. The chart-topping benchmark result helped the Tube T31 to earn a place on our list of the best flash drives. In our testing, we noted that this flash drive was slightly bulky and could block neighboring USB ports on some devices with its width, where USB ports were located close together. The build quality and form of the drive, however, were sturdy and well-constructed.

If you're looking for more savings, check out our Best PC Hardware deals for a range of products, or dive deeper into our specialized SSD and Storage Deals, Hard Drive Deals, Gaming Monitor Deals, Graphics Card Deals, or CPU Deals pages.