I've bought a Sandisk Ultra Luxe USB flash drive about 5 years ago but didn't bother to post my experience after the rather unpleasant experience, but now it's time to buy more flash drives I am now interested to know. What is it that is appealing or an advantage of these all-metal flash drives apart from their sleek elegant metal body and nice finish when compared to the cheaper plastic options? The user experience is not good as I have found as it gets hot to the touch very quickly when in use to the point of burning your fingers when you want to touch it or pull it out from the USB slot. Is there something I"m missing here?

Any IT experts would care to clarify?

Also, just found out that the prices of portable HDD from WD or Seagate 1 TB or 2TB are quite high now compared to several years ago. I bought few 2TBs previously for around RM265 each and now it's all above RM300. I thought prices of these computer accessories should be going down but it looks like it's going up. Inflation is sure real~!

A few sample photos showing the metal flash drives.

Thanks for the information. So far I don't experience any damage to my plastic flash drives but guess I"m lucky. Anyway I don't use flash drives too often and mostly use portable HDDs. I will take note of your experience of damaged/corrupt plastic flash drives and that your metal USB flash drive is still working fine.

Sorry, don't quite understand. What do you mean when you say, "now no more"?

This post has been edited by ryder_78: Oct 6 2025, 01:35 PM

Yes, I just only googled on 'Advantage of All-Metal USB Flash Drive" and you are right, one link described on this. In this sense, I can see this is one advantage in prolonging the longevity of the device when compared to an all-plastic one.

I"ve stopped using the all-metal Sandisk after I used it several times due to the heat issue which was about 4 years ago. Anyway I'll try it again to see if prolonged use (excessive heat) will cause the device to lag in speed or stop working.

I am planning to use these small USB flash drives to store music files and streamed through the streamer. Currently I'm using portable HDD but will try to test the flash drives to see if they will work equally well without any issue.

Just worried if the device stops working or malfunction and it wipes out all the files stored inside it. Has anyone experienced damaged flash drives wiping out all the files and any attempts to retrieve the files are unsuccessful? I may need to do a backup of the files if there is a risk of the files not being able to be retrieved if the device is damaged.

This post has been edited by ryder_78: Oct 6 2025, 01:52 PM

Yes, that is what I found out. So far all my portable HDDs some more than 10 years old are still working fine without any issue. Though I found that the prices of these external HDDS have risen so I am planning to do some 'file cleaning' ie. deleting useless files and transferring some to these flash drives and keeping more important files in these portable external HDDs. I will see how it goes.

I'm using larger than FLAC (WAV and AIFF). Overheat is already confirmed to happen, just need to test if it will cause any disruption, delay or the music completely stops playing when it overheats. If that happens I will go back to the external HDD.

This is something new to me, will investigate. I looked in Shopee and some of the case for these external SSD is quite expensive, more than RM100. Maybe I looked wrongly.

Anyway I've received some recommendations or alternatives to Sandisk flash drives on another thread. It's the Transcend ESD310C and Samsung Bar Plus which look quite interesting.

This post has been edited by ryder_78: Oct 7 2025, 07:39 AM

After talking to some IT experts, I have decided to get a Kingston 1TB NVMe SSD and get a UGreen case for it. The Oricon case looks less elegant although it's slightly cheaper.

As for the flash drives, will likely get some also, may try the Transcend apart from Kingston.

Thanks for the tip.

This is how the case looks like, rather elegant and nicer than the Oricon equivalent.