Sandisk flash drives poor quality of late.

USB Flash Drives Phone Drive
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I’ve stopped buying these drives that have cheap Nan in them now. They throttle when transferring large files down to a crawl at kilobytes per second because of overheating. My 128gb died in the middle of transferring files as it dropped to a crawl, lost all my data. I just bought a 32gb and that gets red hot and drops to a crawl when transferring 10gb of data. Overpriced rubbish and I’m fed up having them fail or throttle to kilobytes per second. I now buy Samsung which is very fast and doesn’t get red hot like these Sandisk drives. Very disappointed with Sandisk, they used to be reliable.

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Hi @ZippyUsb ,

Have you checked our knowledge base articles?
(Get Support for Your SSDs and Flash Products | Sandisk)

Try this one.

Have you opened a Support Case?
If not, contact Sandisk Technical Support for assistance.
(Contact Support | Sandisk)

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You can also check the USB port and controller before blaming the drive itself. On Windows 11, a cheap hub, front panel port, or USB 2 connection can cause poor sustained transfers and extra heat, so you can test the drive directly on a rear USB 3.x port and try another cable. If it still becomes extremely hot and drops to KB/s, that is classic thermal throttling or a failing controller, not a Windows 11 setting. If the drive is already showing errors or disappearing during transfers, you can stop writing to it and use Stellar Data Recovery to recover the files before doing anything else.

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I have already tried different usb ports and even totaly different PC’s as I transfer data a lot. Same result. So, I am not just blaming the drive without testing. Its a pattern I have noticed of late with these drives which is dissapointing, especialy if you pay out for a 128gb or 512gb USB. Thats why I have switched to a different brand with better results. Here is the answer I found online.

Sandisk USB stick throttles down to kilobytes per second due to a combination of thermal throttling, exhausted flash cache, and file-size protocol overhead.

So basicaly if you transfer gigabytes of data, say 12 or 15 in one go, the drive can’t hack it. The small cache fills up too quick, the thermal control is poor (no metal case to help heat radiate away, so it then gets too hot and the safety feature then throttles the speed down to a crawl to protect it from burning out.

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Losing your data in the middle of a transfer makes it even worse. Some USB flash drives can get pretty hot during large file transfers, but dropping to just a few KB/s or failing completely isn’t something I’d ignore. Since you’ve already ruled out the ports and computers, I’d stop using the faulty drives for now. If you still have important files on the 128GB drive, avoid writing anything else to it and try recovering the data first.

Hopefully SanDisk support can look into this, especially since you’ve had the same issue with multiple drives.