Do USB thumb drives slow down as they get hot?

[MrFunex]

I’ve got a few (cheapish) USB thumb drives in the 32-64Gb range and when copying large amounts of data to them, they seem to run at full speed, about 20Mb/sec, for around half a minute, and then slow to 2-5Mb/sec afterwards...

Is this Windows cacheing data, or do cheap drives have a tendency to thermal throttle?

 

[Rroff]

Bit of both.

Also while I've not opened them up to see for sure I've found some generic cheap ones seem to employ some kind of trick of having say 8GB of fast storage but then the rest say 56GB is very very slow - I'll try and dig one out to get a HD Tune graph.

 

[EsaT]

Probably many things.
Thermal throttling, running out of caches with some who knows what QLC flast etc.

 

[darael]

I'm a bit bored with USB thumb drives now. My 128 GB Sandisk Extreme Pro is the fastest USB 3.0 drive that I've owned so far, but it seems to slow down for no obvious reason during file transfers on different computers and USB 3.0 ports.

Recently I've been seriously considering buying an M.2 USB enclosure and putting a Sabrent drive in it. That ought to get me decent speeds without reason to slow down.

 

[Cyber-Mav]

cousin gave me his sandisk 128gb tiny usb drive to put stuff on it. in usb 3 port it gets very hot and drive disappears. in usb2 port it stays cool and works fine. from now on its cheaper and faster to just use ssd in a usb3 caddy. not as portable but far more reliable and quicker.

 

[Rannoch]

I had a few that were hot but the worst offender was the Sandisk 128GB iXpand drive.

 

[MrFunex]

Thanks for the replies. If I get bored one evening, I might open up a spare drive, stick a small heat sink on the memory chip and look at the benchmarks before and after!