USB flash drive slow transfer speeds

Actually, if your USB 3.0 thumb drive is running at a continuous 12mb/s after the initial burst fills the cache, and the drive begins to heat up (Which it WILL), then that is probably pretty normal. I've never had one even stay continuous at that high of a rate of speed. Usually they will even drop down into the kb/s after a while, and then go back up, and then drop down.

Much depends on the number of files, the SIZE of the files, since smaller files are going to transfer at much slower speeds than large files. It takes me about ten minutes or more just to transfer 4-8GB of music files to my 16GB USB 3.0 thumb drive when I update the songs I want on there.

I don't think you have a problem other than being too impatient, which is actually pretty normal.

If you scroll down to the user review photos at the Amazon link you gave, you will see your problem. The 4k write speeds for this drive are 0.5-0.6 MB/s. That's right, half a megabyte per second. The drive will work at or faster than the advertised speed if you're reading/writing sequential data (large files like movies). But absolutely sucks at small files like a Fallout 4 folder.

For this reason,I always tell people to ignore the sequential speeds and concentrate on the 4k speeds when picking a flash card, drive, or SSD. Unless the only thing you plan to use the drive for is movies or photos (i.e. use it in a camera), the 4k speeds will be much closer to the real-world speeds you experience. (Actually the 512k speeds were most representative, but CrystalDiskMark seems to have dropped that in favor of the useless sequential queued.)

Samsung flash media and the higher-end Sandisk flash media ("Extreme" and "Extreme Pro") are pretty much the only ones which consistently score well at 4k speeds. And even those are usually around 2-8 MB/s (which is still better than a hard drive - those only manage about 1 MB/s). Your Lexar is bad, but not as bad as some of the cheaper brands. Many of those get around 0.005 MB/s at 4k writes.

If this is for transferring or backing up the game, rather than playing it, you can zip your Fallout 4 folder into a single zip file. Because that'll be a large file, it will write at the Lexar's sequential write speed, which should be around 60-100 MB/s.

Cost and size. You can get USB flash drives which are about the size of a wireless mouse dongle. And microSD cards are now as large as 400 GB.

and what about long term? lets say 1-2 years. I know ssds have to be powered on for it to retain data but doesn't the same apply to USB flash drives?

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They are both NAND so will lose data after enough time. How long depends on the NAND used so there's no way to be sure. The only reason it's less of an issue on SSDs is because their wear-leveling algorithm occasionally rewrites data to other NAND cells to try to evenly distribute writes. The rewrite refreshes the charge in the NAND cell.

well also considering the price on SSDs has dropped a lot lately it may be actually cheaper to buy a high quality sata SSD than a fast USB flash drive

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They are both NAND, so if the price of one drops, so will the price of the other. USB flash drive prices aren't dropping at the low end because they're already rock-bottom (32GB for $5). The higher capacity USB flash prices have dropped as much as SSDs (256 GB flash has dropped from about $80 to $45 in the last half year).

You DO realize that pretty much 99% of all electronics devices are made in China, right? There are a small percentage made elsewhere, like Japan and South Korea, some very few products in the US and India, and an even smaller number of stragglers elsewhere, but overall the majority of every electronic product you buy has been built and probably assembled in China. Even a lot of stuff that says "Made in the USA" had ALL of the parts made in China and then was assembled here, which allows them to say that. There are a few exceptions, but very few.

So that drive is probably neither better nor worse than any other off brand product, but I'd agree, I wouldn't spend MY money on it without seeing at least one reputable professional review on that product. The fact that almost all of the customer reviews on Amazon, which I normally don't pay attention to unless they are all conclusively the same, say the product is crap, would really lead me to believe that seeking out a professional review is both unlikely to be successful AND is a waste of time.

Actually, most NAND (flash memory) is made in South Korea. I believe Samsung is the only manufacturer with a major NAND fab in China. Other countries where it's manufactured are Japan, Taiwan, and the U.S.

The "crappy Chinese flash" products are usually counterfeit (pretending to be made by a major manufacturer), and use tricks to report a higher capacity than the device actually contains. So they may stick 8 GB of NAND in it, but program it to report 256 GB. You can copy data to it and it'll write to it like it has 256 GB of capacity. But all that's happening is the new data is overwriting old data, which you'll find out when you try to read the data back. It's gotten so bad that I would never buy flash devices from eBay. And the only one I'll buy from Amazon is the Samsung Select (an Amazon-exclusive brand). Anything else I'd buy from a retail store, trusting their supply chain to keep out fakes. Plus I can just drop by and return it if it turns out to be fake.

I'd actually have to tip my hat at a Chinese brand selling a flash drive under their own name. Even if it's a crappy product, at least they're doing it under their own name instead of trying to trick you. That gives them an incentive to improve their product, and thus build up a good brand image.

Also be aware that we're entering a NAND oversupply period. The market transitions between NAND shortage and glut (oversupply). We've been in a shortage for nearly 2 years now, which led to prices holding steady and in some cases increasing. Demand has leveled off, and supply has overshot so we're seeing prices drop now as manufacturers try to clear out excess supply. So we're going to see dropping prices and price inversions (like new 256GB SSDs costing the same or less than older 256 GB USB flash drives) for the next few months. Usually these cycles take 1-3 years, though I've seen one last as short as 6 months. So if you need flash storage, now is a good time to buy. Although if you don't need it immediately, I'd wait until Spring in case prices drop some more.