SSD flash drives

[Memeito]

Some manufacturers make these flash drives that claim to have SSD technology inside. SanDisk Extreme Pro and Corsair Flash Voyager GTX for example look just like usb sticks but they are sold as SSDs.
Are these a good option for a Pi 4 instead of a regular SD card, what is your experience with these devices?

[goodburner]

They are terrible and even a sd card beats them in performance

[bomblord]

The sandisk models outperform their microSD equivelants by fairly substantial amounts

Extreme Pro 128GB flash drive


Each bench was taken from their respective reviews on the same website. Both are the "extreme pro" models and both are the same storage capacity. Note the types of tests used in each (ex 4k, 4Kq32, Seq, etc) I couldn't find any tests that used the exact same workload so I went with the closest I could find.

[andrum99]

Some manufacturers make these flash drives that claim to have SSD technology inside. SanDisk Extreme Pro and Corsair Flash Voyager GTX for example look just like usb sticks but they are sold as SSDs.
Are these a good option for a Pi 4 instead of a regular SD card, what is your experience with these devices?

SSD is flash!

[Memeito]

SSD is flash!

SSDs are supposed to be better than regular USB sticks: better performance, more reliable, better error correction, higher number of erase/write cycles, etc.

[wildfire]

Are these a good option for a Pi 4 instead of a regular SD card, what is your experience with these devices?

Be aware that at this moment the Pi4 does not support USB booting so you're going to need a uSD card anyway. I'd advise getting a decent uSD (A1, avoid A2) for the time being.