data traveler exordia flash drive brand new and is very slow

My MacBook Pro is ten years old and works fine. My time machine backup hard drive is fine.

I just purchased a DataTraveler Exordia 256GB flash drive to backup artwork, photos and other important files.


It worked fine and then today it started to work so slowly - not just moving files from the laptop to the flash drive but opening files on the flash drive.


disappointing since this was not a cheap flash drive and never had this problem before


any ideas?

MacBook Pro 15″, macOS 12.7

Posted on Sep 13, 2025 7:08 AM

Reply
2 replies

Sep 13, 2025 8:23 AM in response to Pik Pro

Flash drives and "thumb drives" are not very reliable and they might choke with large sustained writes because usually they have small fast caches. It is best to use a proper SSD (or slower old spinning HDD) drive to store important files and backups. For a SSD I prefer SLC, MLC or TLC and avoid QLC:


https://www.howtogeek.com/444787/multi-layer-ssds-what-are-slc-mlc-tlc-qlc-and-mlc/

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data traveler exordia flash drive brand new and is very slow

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