Got a SanDisk 256MB stick for $25 after rebate at Circuit City last month.

As for "best overall," I don't think there's enough difference to matter. They all do pretty much the same thing, with pretty much the same (high) reliability, and pretty much the same (fast enough to seem instantaneous) speed.

These are the standard medium for my students to bring in their classroom presentations these days. Among the group they use every brand any of us has ever heard of and a few more besides. Most of them get fairly heavy use storing all the stuff they're working on so they can sit down at any lab machine and have all their files. Nobody has ever said a thing about any problems with any of them. I've never noticed a performance difference in transfering files to my laptop or running a PowerPoint presentation from the stick.

Go for capacity, price, size, appearance, convenience of store...