I’m thinking about getting one for several purposes, primarily for portable software, some certificates and keys, and a few backups. Since it won’t be powered off for more than a few days or weeks and won’t experience heavy writing (although I plan to use Veracrypt and that may cause some stress)
How long can I expect it to last? Obviously there will be backups, but I also don’t want to lose anything on it as much as possible.
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4GBThe first usb stick I bought more than 15 years ago, still works.
The very first USB stick I bought was 32MB and I thought that was a lot cause it held way more than a floppy.
Mine was 64 and thought i found gold when I found a lost 256mb. Think I paid about $100 ircc. Had been using 100mb zip drives before usbs.
In 2000 or so a 1GB stick was $999 at Tiger Direct. Who could use a whole gig?!
I have this exact same USB drive, 4GB also bought around 15 years ago it still works like a charm
in my experience they last as long as you can keep track of them, and, as long as the storage offered is congruent with your needs. I found a 16mb usb drive the other day. It still functions but I can’t think of what I’d use it for in this age, I have flac songs that are larger than the drive lol
The secret nerd technique they don’t want you to know is to get a big usb stick housing for a proper m.2 SSD stick. Form wise its a slightly chunkier usb stick. Inside is a proper drive you can buy from a reputable source with terrabytes of storage and 3.0 speeds. A reputable SSD drive will easily last a decade.
As far as store bought regular old sandisk will last a long long time.
Really wish that’s an option since I have m.2 lying around but it’s not really pocket edc material.
https://www.amazon.com/ELUTENG-Enclosure-Protocol-Adapter-External/dp/B08H22BV1N There are dozens like this in all sorts of tech stores. Definitely bigger than a usb driver but not THAT much bigger
you can also get enclosures for 2230 drives. Pretty small at that point.
You mean 3.2g2 speeds
Sure, whatever nerd.
If you don’t understand the difference between 3.0 and 3.2g2, then using an m.2 enclosure is purely meaningless to you as well.
As someone who works in IT since 2005 I haven’t seen many die. Then again we barely use them so maybe in my life I’ve handled about 10-15 and seen 2 die. One in spectacular fashion when our department gave us all one since they thought it was a tool that was needed. Every single one of them ended up dying within the year. Just goes to show quality of the product can matter significantly sometimes. Outside that, they are pretty reliable, but I also would trust them the least out of the other options available for storage.
It seems to be a huge lottery. I’ve only had one or two fail but that was like 2008. Supposedly there is some sort of data rot or failure rate but I’ve never experienced it. Seems highly random
Not long enough is the true answer.
If they just sit around on a shelf, they’ll still slowly lose charge until one day the data just isn’t readable. If they’re on a keychain, I haven’t had one last for more than two years, and I don’t get my keys wet or anything.
Even if you take great care, the data will still slowly corrupt because of how nand flash works. Unless you’re rewriting all data every couple years, never getting it wet or exposing it to much, etc, they’ll all fail sooner than you’d ever hope.
That’s on top of any chance at physical damage. I wouldn’t trust any modern thumbdrive beyond an immediate need to carry data from one place to another.
I’d never trust a USB stick with my only copy of anything I care about. They get dropped, stepped on, accidentally dropped into vats of hydrofluoric acid, etc. Doesn’t matter how long it can theoretically last if its USB jack gets bent and becomes detached from the PCB.
If you’re going to use it regularly, get a few and sync them together once week or so. Or sync to cloud. Or sync to a folder on your PC. They usually last awhile, biggest issue is losing them.
Honestly, this vastly depends on the type of drive, and who made it. I have had cheap drives fail after 6-7 months of usage before but, that was because I was using it for external storage for an RPI so it was doing a lot of writes.
Using it for a write few read many style system(like bootable OS images via ventoy), I had had flash drives that have lasted 10+ years now. but I wouldn’t recommend using them for anything that was super write heavy.
Using it for a write few read many style system
What does this even mean?
I read it as occasional use on any os. If you have a Raspberry Pi running 24/7 and it’s constantly whacking that memory stick with read / writes it’s going to die faster than the USB stick you use to install Linux twice a year
It’s referencing the type of operation being done on the drive. A write operation being changing the information on the drive, a read operation being reading something from the drive. A write few read many indicates that most operations on the device are read operations/not changing the data on the device. Some examples of this would be a thumb drive being used for presentations or being used as a source to copy files to another system. These setups are fairly low write count when compared to read count. An example of a write many read many would be using the drive as a swap drive, or as an OS drive such as tails where the intent would be keeping the OS on the drive instead of just copying it to make the actual file system
I’ve always managed to lose them before they die. Current senior partner of the group is a 4gb HP drive circa ~2013. My loyal document carrier.
