You can still get a drive that will beat the ethernet connection by a lot for $50.

But also I'd feel weird if I didn't have at least one good flash drive somewhere, so anyone like me would already have it.

I'm going to ignore the part where the USB port described in the article sounds broken. A 100% functioning cable, especially a short one for a drive, is not hard to find.

If you haven't yet got any portable drives in the drawer, chances are high that you rarely need to copy large amount of files around anyway. In which case free tier of cloud sync services would be preferred for the majority of users.