Review on 💾 Samsung BAR Plus 32GB - High Speed USB 3.1 Flash Drive (Titan Gray) - MUF-32BE4/AM by Alvaro Delic

Was looking for a flash drive with decent 4k random read/write speeds. For my purposes (Linux Live USB with persistence and PortableApps) these criteria are very important. The SanDisk Extreme PRO USB 3.1 was highly recommended and the benchmarks are very high. Unfortunately, it also comes at a price that matches its excellent performance. Considering the price, I'm leaning towards a small case plus an M.2 SATA SSD. I bought the Samsung BAR Plus after seeing CrystalDiskMark review images which showed over 10MB/s random read/write in 4K. You're lucky enough to get 5MB/s random 4k on most USB sticks, and there are even some bad USB 3.0 sticks that run well below 1MB/s. For reference, in these tests, mechanical hard drives show speeds of around 2-4MB/s. I've been using this drive for a week now and so far so good. I currently have Linux Mint (with various desktop environments), Manjaro, Kubuntu and Ubuntu with 1GB of casper-rw save files per distro on disk. Performance was slightly (but noticeably) better compared to the SanDisk Ultra USB 3.0 I used, and much, much better than the metal Kingston USB 2.0 I had on my keychain. Mine got uncomfortably warm after transferring 20GB of data (via YUMI Multiboot), but I think that was due to the lack of space and virtually no airflow. The drive cooled down fairly quickly as soon as I plugged it into my laptop where there was a gentle breeze. If money wasn't an issue, I'd go for the Extreme PRO. Unfortunately, it is, and the Samsung BAR Plus is a good, inexpensive alternative for my use case. I buy a few more of these so I have dedicated drives for the distros I like (with a 20+ GB permanent partition instead of a 4GB max permanent file).