I have a SanDisk Ultra Fit 32GB SDCZ43 BM150224846D I bought 2012ish, and it has worked well with with heavy use every since day since! It is above room temperature, never hot, and is of quality I’d expect from SanDisk. Bought at BestBuy… probably $50-60ish at the time.
I have a SanDisk Cruzer Fit 32GB SDCZ33 BM190226621J I bought 2018ish from aliexpress, maybe $15ish. Hot as hades, and failed within a year under similar usage, only mountable read-only and had data loss. I’m expecting there is a current limited short somewhere, the heat produced and energy consumed when idle is outrageous!
I love the small form factor and I’d hoped to find reputable information on what is and is not of quality from SanDisk. On reading these forum posts the only clear pattern appears to be pre-2014 USB 3.0 flash drives are of reliable quality.
The Ultra Fit gets so hot that the plastic cracks and bits fall off.
I sent my Ultra Fit to Sandisk in Poland and they replaced it with the all metal Ultra Luxe. The Ultra Luxe also gets extremely hot!
I have many drives and none get as hot as Sandisk USB 3 drives.
Clearly they have a design issue.
I have recently purchased SanDisk 128GB Ultra Dual Drive Luxe USB Type-C. It gets extremely hot when I tried to backup my phone ( the backup was about 100GB) with their application (Memory Zone). I couldn’t even touch it. It burned my fingers. Also, the transfer speed got slowed down dramatically.
I also have and SanDisk Ultra Fit 3.0, it does overheat, probably because it is small, does not disperse heat, and also because they tried to fit everything in, the wires have to be thin. And remember, as the thickness of the wire gets smaller, there is more resistance for the electrical current to move through the wire, which is why it is so hot. Also, with the physical aspect, it does not have much ventilation, and not much surface area to disperse heat to the air.
I hope this will help you all!
For those who are having the same problem. I found kind a solution to this issue. Because of the higher transfer speeds of usb3.0, disk is overheating. I connect it to a extender like bellow link (I am having this extender from my old logitech mouse) so the extender prevents the disk to use usb3.0 capabilities and the disk stops getting overheated. Ok I know this is kind of a bummer but at least with this method I can use my 64GB flash drive
Just thought I would sign up to mention that this is still an issue 2022. I usually do not spend this amount of money on a USB stick since cheaper ones have worked just fine in the past. Me, and I am guessing most other people here have used other USB sticks in the past. So to pretend we can’t make a decent judgment on whether something gets too hot is not fair. I think this is also more justified after several people mentioning it gets so hot that parts are melting off. Someone earlier on in the thread also did a pretty elaborate test to check.
I bought two and will have to throw both away. It’s not worth potentially damaging the computer parts over. Fortunately I do have two others not from Sandisk for a third of the price that work well.
Recommend Sandisk to own up and fix it since these days people will find out when word spreads online. Owning up to it after will gain respect. Trying to ignore and hide it will not.
