> > Admittedly you can buy a micro SD-card like the Apacer ...
>
> Don�t buy Apacer. The ones I got had rubbish write rates.

>I agree. Kingston ones are quite snappy.

...fair comment on the performance of micro SD-cards, but the main point of my R-Pi model 3B testing is that you do not need to buy a micro SD-card at all and the equivalent capacity USB flash drives are cheaper.

I was attempting to do an apples to apples price comparison:

Apacer 64GB micro SD-card $28

Apacer 64GB USB flash drive $21.85

A secondary point is that not all USB flash drives with Raspbian installed will boot with no mirco SD-card. I've now tested 2 that will boot:

Apacer AH356 64GB USB 3.1 Flash Drive $21.85
SanDisk Cruzer Switch 64GB USB Flash Drive $21.85 (going EOL)

Gordon Hollingworth wrote a blog in August 2016 in which he states his reasons why some USB flash drives won't boot a R-Pi 3B with no micro SD-card...

There are a couple of known issues:

Some flash drives power up too slowly. There are many spinning disk drives that don�t respond within the allotted two seconds. It�s possible to extend this timeout to five seconds, but there are devices that fail to respond within this period as well, such as the Verbatim PinStripe 64GB.

Some flash drives have a very specific protocol requirement that we don�t handle; as a result of this, we can�t talk to these drives correctly. An example of such a drive would be the Kingston Data Traveller 100 G3 32G.

His blog states that these USB drives would boot-up rasbpian OK...

Sandisk Cruzer Fit 16GB
Sandisk Cruzer Blade 16Gb
Samsung 32GB USB 3.0 drive
MeCo 16GB USB 3.0

From looking through PB-Tech's range of 64GB USB flash drives, there are about 30 different drives, from 9 different vendors and the price ranges from $21 to $71.

At this stage I can only confirm that 2 of these 30 will boot raspbian on my R-Pi 3B when I have no micro SD-Card.

If you buy another brand / model of USB flash drive and your R-Pi model 3B will boot raspbian OK, then please let everyone know.

cheers,
Ian.

PS: When it comes to micro SD-Cards from PB Tech, then there are about 20 in the 64GB capacity and they are priced from the Apacer at $28 to a SanDisk at $102.

For write performance then it seems the best on offer is: SanDisk 64GB Mobile Extreme Pro microSDXC 95MB/S read, 90MB/s write CLASS 10/UHS-3 at $102.