You definitely want an SSD, not a flash drive, for any data you care about and which requires fast write speeds.
It's worth keeping in mind that USB C is not a speed rating, it's a connector standard, like USB A ('standard', if blue inside, it's USB 3 compatible), MicroUSB (legacy, USB 2 only I believe), which can be used for USB 2 or 3.
USB 2.0 is rated at 480 Mb/s, also keeping in mind the confusing way people indicate speeds, mainly for marketing purposes.
8 bits make one byte, 1 bit is 2^1 (0 or 1, off/on value), 1 byte is 2^3 bits = 8 bits. Nobody in the real tech industry uses Megabytes (MB) except disk vendors to make their disks look bigger. Any time that is used it's a slight warning to you to be cautious about that vendor or product or documentation. Computers use base 2 for this stuff, marketing people use base 10 because "it's bigger".
1. Mb/s = megabit/second. This is not ambiguous if written correctly, lower case 'b' means bits.
2. MB/s = ambiguous, either Megabyte (1 Megabyte = 10^6 bytes, 1,000,000 bytes/Mebibyte (2^20, 1,048,576 bytes). Technically MB means Megabyte but is unfortunately used loosely to indicate either.
3. MiB/s = Mebibyte/second. This is the correct technical term because it's not ambiguous.
480 Mb/s is max 60 MiB / second, but rarely actually performs that well. Realistically maybe max of 40 MiB/s depending on the hardware. The I/O chips will be the bottleneck there, not the USB 2.0 speed.
USB 3 chips are much more expensive and power hungry because they are at least 10x faster than USB 2 chips, and require USB 3 cables and connectors, whether type A (standard looking, will have blue inside to indicate usb 3 support), or type C. If it didn't say on the cable that it supports usb 3, you can safely assume it's usb 2 only until you verify it in testing. If anything in the chain is not USB 3 compatible it will drop down to USB 2 automatically. I can't think of any audio application that would require USB 3 speeds, which run 5-10+ Gb/s. Even if you're storing 2 channel 192/32 bit data directly. 12288 kbps (12288000 b/s, aka 11.7MiB/s) you could be running maybe 8 channels of that without hitting top max of realworld USB 2 speeds. I think I have this right, trusting an online calculator for the bit rates.
SSDs contain complex logic internally that makes writes far faster and more reliable, flash drives tend to just dump the data onto the chip directly using some cheap logic, which results in overheating, very unreliable long term life, etc. SSDs are so cheap now that as long as you go with a quality vendor like Crucial or Samsung, you'll be fine. I always buy crucials myself, but the current price is hitting roughly $0.10 / GiB (10 cents) of storage. Flash drives also tend to start overheating on long write operations, and start to slow more and more because of this. This overheating is also what eventually kills the drive, partly at least.
Note that understanding the difference between MB/GB/TB and MiB/GiB/TiB is quite important when making disk purchasing decisions because some vendors use MB, not MiB values on their docs/product listings, which means if you order a 1000 GB drive, that will actually show correct as 976 GiB when you view it in most modern operating systems. Vendors do this, sadly, to trick you, and make their drives sound bigger than they actually are. Note that data is almost always written in KiB/MiB/GiB units on operating systems today, as far as I know anyway, so you'd be confused why the two numbers weren't matching.
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