[tmihai20]

The light flashes whenever data is read or written to the USB stick, if this coincides with the trouble in LE, then that's a pretty big indicator what the problem is.

I'd imagine those read speeds are maximum sequential read speeds, not the random reads that makes more importance. I'd imagine a mSD would be much more portable than a USB stick, what with it being smaller and all.

My money would be the on the different sticks making the bigger difference over the boxes, but it's entirely possibly there is some variation in the boxes too.

Any recommendations on which USB stick to use and what size in GBs?

I would recommend a USB3 stick like this one KINGSTON DataTraveler R3.0 G2. I have the 64 GB version for my own use and a 16 GB for work and it absolutely flies. I mean it one of the best USB sticks I ever had I think the 32 GB version has the best price.