I have similar problems, I bought ordinary HDD disks for 80-120 gigabytes. Their price is now like a USB flash drive.
Or buy 40-60 GB SSD drives, it will be a little more expensive, but you will get more speed at boot time.
I now use USB flash drives only for testing, because this is not the most reliable option.
I would strongly agree with this,a branded SSD of 60 GB will serve you well with your purpose.Now really good brand USB-s like Corsair and HyperX which are premium ones cost more than a small size SSD.All your problems will vanish right away once you switch to SSD.
You can even go cheaper if you want,I have a Kingfast 60 GB SSD which is running since 2019 without problems and that is a Chinese brand SSD which you can buy for 12-15 USD in Aliexpress.
12-15 USD
![Smiley](https://bitcointalk.org/Smileys/default/smiley.gif)
For this money, I bought 5-6 80 GB SATA hard drives at a computer junk sale.
For Hive OS this is a very good solution, for Windows it works very slowly with old hard drives.
But a hard drive consumes more power than a USB flash drive, but a hard drive is more reliable.