Good sale on thumbdrive - Amazon, 2024-Sep-17

[Haertig]

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07XHYVN62

$8.99 for a quite fast read-speed 64GB micro thumbdrive. Write speeds are average.



If you are in the market for one of the tiny "leave in place" thumbdrives, this one is on sale at Amazon today (don't know for how long). These are good for leaving permanently stuck into a laptop because they are so small they don't get snagged on things.

I may or may not have mentioned this thumbdrive in the past on this forum. I bought one about two years ago (and another one just today). Initially I complained about the slow speed of the device. But I have subsequently found out that that was due to some problem - probably unique to my computer setup - that was detecting it as a USB2 (not USB3) drive. I moved the thumbdrive to other ports on my computer, and tried it on different computers, and it has been very fast in every place except the one port on my desktop computer where I originally tried it and found the slow speeds.

Here are the speeds I get out of the device now:



Here are the original speeds I was disappointed with (these are USB2 speeds, not USB3 - they are due the the drive being incorrectly detected as USB2):



This drive does not get hot as some do. Not in my experience. But I will state that I use thumbdrives intermittently - not as a constant-use one-shot write of their total capacity in one fell swoop. It might well heat up during use cases like that, but I don't know about that.

 

[d_marsh]

That is a good deal. I was backing up my laptop the other day and it's amazing how much faster the transfer speed is on USB 3.2 versus even 3.0.

 

[Haertig]

That is a good deal. I was backing up my laptop the other day and it's amazing how much faster the transfer speed is on USB 3.2 versus even 3.0.

I often times boot my computer from a USB3 thumbdrive. It only takes about a minute to boot a full Linux distro and load the entire operating system into memory. It boots even faster if you run the OS off the thumbdrive, skipping the step where you load it into memory. Running from a USB3 thumbdrive is much faster than running from a hard drive. Not as fast as running from an SSD though. But if you want to do better than even SSD speeds - load the entire OS into memory (like I said, it only takes a minute). Then it runs blazing fast. Pretty amazing stuff.

 

[Haertig]

I just found (and purchased!) another of my favorite thumbdrives on sale at Amazon. Actually, it's a microSD card and reader (the reader is very small).

Compared to the Lexar drive I mentioned above, this card/reader combo has a little slower read speeds, but significantly faster write speeds. So if you need fast writing, this is the one to get. Note that you need BOTH the card AND the card reader to get the highest speed. Using the card shown in a generic card reader knocks the speeds down.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0C1PP1T29

$12.99 for 128GB with phenomenal write speed and excellent read speed.



Here are the speeds I'm getting with this card and reader combo. That write speed is REALLY good.

If you use this microSD card in a generic reader (at least the generic reader that I have), the speeds drop to 95 read and 87 write. Still an excellent write speed, and an acceptable read speed. But with the combo card AND reader for only $12.99 right now, it doesn't make sense to buy just the card (the card by itself costs $19.99 - more than the combo with the reader!)

For size comparison, here are the Lexar micro thumbdrive mentioned initially, the Samsung card+reader just now mentioned in this post, and a generic thumbdrive side-by-side: