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~!

Some sample photos showing the metal flash drives.

It seems to be an issue with Sandisk specifically, I got a few and they all burn your fingers

I have a Samsung Bar Plus and it keeps a reasonable temp
Other brands are also ok

but, speeds are what they sacrifice

And yeah, HDDs are expensive now, watch out for scams

I would suggest considering Transcend ESD310C, it's a SSD in a pendrive form factor, under heavy extended load it does get hot but it isn't as bad as the sandisk

Thanks for the response, surely appreciated. The Transcend ESD310C is something new to me and upon further investigation it is a rather appealing device, SSD in small form and price is not too exorbitant. It's a good alternative to Sandisk flash drives.

I think I'm done with metal USB flash drives from Sandisk due to the poor user experience as it always burns the fingers when you want to remove it from the USB slot. Due to this reason, I have stopped using it after few times since 4 years ago as I got a phobia of touching it and getting my fingers burned again. Good to know Samsung Bar Plus is another alternative to the Sandisk.

As for HDDs, I've read some reviews on the Shopee platform and surprisingly even with official Seagate store, there are some comments or allegations that the portable HDDs are fake due to slow speed, can't copy some files or something else. Anyway I still have few HDDs bought long time ago and fortunately they are all working fine so I won't be buying any HDDs at the moment as the current prices seem to have gone up quite drastically during these recent years. I'll just need to do some 'file-cleaning' some time, delete or clean up the unwanted files to free up some space.

I recall from around 2000 to 2015 the prices of portable HDDs go from expensive to cheap, then after that stay stagnant few years. Maybe starting from 2020 the price started to go up, likely due to inflation. Anyway, good thing prices of TVs are still on the downward trend.

Transcend ESD310C in my Shopee shopping cart now. Will likely place order on 9/10 in the evening..

The form factor is too small, that's why it heats up