On my system, flash drives slow down with age. The worst example is a two or three month old 3.0 drive, which I've been using for the virtual drives of VMs, sometimes writes at less than 1MB/s. Is this kind of thing normal, and would switching to an SSD solve it?
I haven't seen much degrading of USB Thumb drives, use a few different brands such as Verbatim, Lexar, SanDisk, a PNY and a Crucial, sizes from 2GB to 64GB and keep them all formatted as FAT32 but the 64GB can't be done with Windows due to its 32GB limitation, I use GPARTED to do those. All I have obtained have been factory-formatted as FAT32, usable on Linux, Mac OS X, newer macOS and Windows. I do have a 32GB formatted as exFAT that gets around the 4GB single-file size of FAT32.
Have you enabled USB 3 in the VM.3.0 drive, which I've been using for the virtual drives of VMs
Also is the drive almost full, that will slow it down
The drive in question just died, so it seems to be unsafe to use a flash drive as a substitute for an HDD or an SSD.
All hardware are subject to fails.
On a USB drive, the communication link speed (USB3.x, USB2.0) doesn't mean that it will work (read & writes) at that speed.
Have seen many fake drives (they don't have the announced capacity) for sale, specially on eBay.
Fast and reliable USB drives have high prices.
I've been using a couple of 64GB Thumb/Flash drives for a few years without failures, keep one at factory-formatted FAT32 but has a single-file size limit of 4GB and the other is formatted as exFAT to get away from that FAT32 limit. NTFS-formatting has not been an option with Macintosh for full access, usually read-only without third-party software but have only a couple of clients with Macs.
I've not had suitable success with installing normal versions of Windows on removable drives but Linux can do it just fine, always have Linux Mint on an 8GB Thumb drive with me when making house calls.
Quote