Since you can get a USB 3.0 1TB Thumb Drive from the Mothership for less than $40, what purpose does this serve?
It might be faster, but so long as manufacturers get away with describing I/O speeds for flash media as “up to”, consumers are mostly in the dark.
The product description is worthless – what are the minimum read and write speeds for these drives? Will they freeze dead for several seconds at a time? What is their endurance? Many sellers leave out this information entirely (like this one) or substitute Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF) for TeraBytes Written (TBW); will these crap out after writing their full capacity a few times? I need to see numbers – meaningful ones.
In computer terms these devices are STORAGE, not memory…
I don’t know about thumb drives that cheap for 1TB, but the biggest difference between thumb drives and ssds is the built in controller the ssd has. Very little similarity in performance. Thumb drives are simply not designed for the constant/endless writes all over the flash media as they don’t have a controller that helps this and typically the flash chips in thumb drives are not going to have quite the same performance. SSDs will almost always win the performance battle. Thumb drives win portability. That’s pretty much it.