Hey there gerbils!
I've been doing some offline mass imaging of systems using the SanDisk Ultra Flair 64GB USB3 drive. The reads are fine for my task, as the systems run mechanical drives, but the write speed is atrocious at around 10-15MB sustained. Since the imaging is offline, I have a rather large image that must fit on each drive and it's taking days to finish prepping all the drives. I have more of these deployments planned and would like to reduce the time it takes me to get them prepped.
Reading reviews of other drives it appears this is pretty normal for thumb drives. It seems every model I read about has similar issues or can burst higher but then go to sleep for up to a few minutes and then continue on (presumably some kind of throttling).
Anyone have any thumbs on experience with any drives to recommend something that would actually be better? I've contemplated eBay 80GB SSDs, but having them hang off the front USB port while imaging makes me a little uneasy with the staff that will be helping with this. I've also pondered an SD card in an adapter as those things seem to be perfectly capable of the read/write tasks, which is odd...