I've owned this mini M2 Pro for years and love it. It now seems to be cooking cheaper thumb drives when I try and move a file around 700MB. It happens plugged into the mini or my NVMe dock.
This particular drive is a Sandisk Ultra USB 3.0 32GB and it used to work fine. I never noticed this issue before Tahoe, but that may not be significant. I've even tried plugging it into my NVMe dock and it still gets hot enough to self-eject during the transfer. Meanwhile, the actual NVMe drive in that same dock runs cool and handles GBs of data without a hitch.
I realize buying a higher quality drive is the solution, I just wondered if others have seen this?
EDIT: Other AI's weren't helpful but I hadn't thought to ask Claude until now. It said: With macOS Tahoe 26, Apple introduced refined power management and USB controller protocols that, while intended to optimize performance, can sometimes exacerbate compatibility challenges with external storage devices. This has been a persistent complaint since the early Tahoe releases. Users on MacRumors have noted drive ejection issues going back to Tahoe 26.3, with some reporting that it's the only thing that changed in their setup.EaseUS MacRumors
Claude helped me write a script with the 'rsync' command that slows down the transfer. I'm using under 2000 KB/s and I have successfully transferred 1 GB so far. I can share that if you folks are interested. It shows progress.