r/sandisk

Hey everyone

I've been doing a lot of research into USB flash drives lately and wanted to share my experience and get some input from people who've actually used these drives long term.

I'm based in Singapore and just picked up (or am about to pick up) the SanDisk Ultra Luxe USB 3.2 Gen 1 128GB from Bizgram. Got it for S$39 which seems like a decent price. The packaging has a Weikeng Technology sticker on it — after checking, they're the official authorised SanDisk distributor in Singapore since 1990 so that checked out fine.

My main concern is endurance under heavy use and its longevity

I'm planning to use this drive to move around 150GB of data per day, at least for the first few weeks, and then use it for long term storage after that. I know that's a lot of read/write cycles for a thumb drive and I was worried about:

Data rot — will sustained heavy writes cause data corruption or silent data loss over time?

Write speed throttling — SanDisk doesn't publish write speeds for this drive which is a bit of a red flag. Real world benchmarks seem to suggest it drops significantly under sustained transfers. Has anyone actually tested this?

NAND quality — SanDisk sources NAND externally unlike Samsung who fabs their own. Does this actually matter in practice for a drive like this?

TBW (Terabytes Written) — SanDisk hasn't published any official TBW figure for the Ultra Luxe. Neither has Samsung for the BAR Plus for that matter. Has anyone actually run an endurance test on either of these drives to destruction and documented it?

For context, here's the ranking I landed on after my research: (In order)

1. Samsung BAR Plus (best NAND quality, own V-NAND TLC, most consistent for heavy writes)

2. SanDisk Ultra Luxe (solid build, 5 year warranty, but weakest for sustained writes of the four)

3. Kingston DataTraveler Max (fastest by far but likely QLC NAND underneath the cache — cache exhaustion kicks in around 50GB)

Im leaning more towards the sandisk ultra luxe as it seems to be cheaper and more easier to find as compared to the samsung bar plus.

Has anyone here used the Ultra Luxe or BAR Plus under heavy daily write conditions? Would love to know how yours held up. And if anyone has actual TBW data from real world testing, that would be gold. Im also worried about the warrenty terms and what is coverde.

Thanks in advance.

I mostly browse, work, and do some light photo editing.

Would I actually notice a difference or is it mostly benchmark numbers?