Sandisk USB Flash Drive Performance Question

[MtlTom]

I want a 32GB flash drive for GOD/GWG/XBLA games. I've recently purchased two different Sandisk 32GB USB drives (Cruzer Glide & Cruzer Blade) that are both giving the "Performance Warning" message. I bought the Glide first then exchanged it for the Blade. I've had good luck with Sandisk flash drives on the 360 in the past (smaller capacities) and the few reviews I read pertaining to 360 usage prior to purchasing seemed to indicate that either of these 32GB drives would work fine.

Doing testing on my 360, the write speed is very slow but the read speed seems to be pretty decent and I can't really tell a difference compared to the hard drive. Does anyone have any experience using either of these drives for playing games? Do they perform OK?

Are there any other recommendations for 32GB drives or should I maybe just go with multiple 16GBs?

 

[The Ebbtide]

I cannot answer anything about the Cruzer questions, but:

Are there any other recommendations for 32GB drives or should I maybe just go with multiple 16GBs?

I use the Xbox branded 16GB flash drive. It works well, and I tend to use it specifically as a memory card, though I have used it for arcade and retail installs (both disc and digital downloads). I don't think I've ever noticed slow down or loading issues when I have used it for installs. While I would recommend it, I wouldn't recommend having several of them. It would depend on the situation of how you're using it, I think there's a limit on how many flash drives you can have connected to the system (I could be wrong, but I thought there was a limit of 2 at a time).

By 'situation of use' I'm wondering if you are using the flash drive for specific games? I used the flash drive I have to install one of the GTA V discs, so that it would run smoother from two sources (flash drive and hard drive). I also considered buying a second flash drive just to install the digital copy of Halo 3 to so that it would run slightly better. In those cases I would be assigning a flash drive specifically to a game, though. While it makes sense to do so because of speed benefit, I wouldn't want to go beyond 2 because of the clutter, and concern of slow down it might encourage with all of the different memory sources and files within them.

Are you completely out of hard drive space, or do you lack a hard drive? I've debated upgrading to a 320GB hard drive because of space constraints with my 250GB, but the price of it has always made me reconsider. The flash drives seem like a cheaper solution until you purchase multiples and essentially would've been better of buying a new, larger hard drive instead.

 

[MtlTom]

I have a fat 360 with a 120GB HDD. I'm pretty close to capacity so I'm mainly planning on using the drive for backlog storage. It would be nice if I could play the games directly from the drive rather than having to swap games between the HDD & flash drive. The write speed on the drive is above the 15 MB/s rating Rockstar has for GTA so I'm assuming other games won't be a problem, but I wanted to see what kind of performance other people have had. I'd imagine the "below spec" rating is because of the write speed.

I can upgrade to a 250GB HDD but the official MS ones are hard to come by and most of my friends have had varied success with unofficial drives for the fat. Plus a lot of the generic ones don't have the OG Xbox backwards compatibility, which I use from time to time.