Background: I have a bunch of Amazon-sourced USB sticks, in sizes 4 GB, 8 GB, 16 GB, 32 GB, and 64 GB. Most are 10-packs of the style with the wrap-around metal protector that swings out of the way when you need to use the USB. Over a couple or three years I haven't encountered any issues with any of them ... until a couple of days ago.
Facing the expiration of Windows 10 and having multiple computers that aren't up to snuff to run Windows 11, I want to play with Linux a bit to see if I think I can transition to Linux when Windows 10 reaches end of support next year. I have settled on MMDE6 as the Linux distro I'm most interested in. It's a distro of Mint Cinnamon, but it's based on Debian rather than Ubuntu. One of the reasons (not the only one) I'l leaning that way is that LMDE still (so far, at least) supports 32-bit as well as 64-bit.
I made up a USB stick with LMDE6 for testing in "live" mode. It didn't take what I considered to be an exceptionally long time to make up the USB stick, and it runs on an older HP laptop no slower than Windows 10 on a physical hard drive, and probably a bit faster. But, although Rufus allows the creation of a partition on the USB to allow Linux to be "persistent" (meaning it will save any configuration and customization changes you make), on a 4 GB drive I only had room for a 500 MB persistent partition. That's not big enough to try installing and running the Linux version of FreeOffice on the USB.
So I made up another USB stick, this time using a 16 GB stick and creating a 4 GB partition for the persistent function. OMG! It took (literally) overnight for Rufus to format the USB stick and install a bootable version of LMDE6. On the same HP laptop as the other USB stick, the 16 GB stick takes forevvvvvvvvver to boot into Linux, and everything runs like molasses in January. I ran a benchmark on th 4 GB stick and I'm currently running the same benchmark on the 16 GB stick. So far, the read speed on the 16 GB stick is about half as fast as the 4 GB stick, and the write speed is about one-third.
Does anyone have a source for affordable, FAST USB sticks in the 8 GB to 16 GB range?