Ask Lemmy
A Fediverse community for open-ended, thought provoking questions
Rules: (interactive)
1) Be nice and; have fun
Doxxing, trolling, sealioning, racism, and toxicity are not welcomed in AskLemmy. Remember what your mother said: if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. In addition, the site-wide Lemmy.world terms of service also apply here. Please familiarize yourself with them
2) All posts must end with a '?'
This is sort of like Jeopardy. Please phrase all post titles in the form of a proper question ending with ?
3) No spam
Please do not flood the community with nonsense. Actual suspected spammers will be banned on site. No astroturfing.
4) NSFW is okay, within reason
Just remember to tag posts with either a content warning or a [NSFW] tag. Overtly sexual posts are not allowed, please direct them to either !asklemmyafterdark@lemmy.world or !asklemmynsfw@lemmynsfw.com.
NSFW comments should be restricted to posts tagged [NSFW].
5) This is not a support community.
It is not a place for 'how do I?', type questions.
If you have any questions regarding the site itself or would like to report a community, please direct them to Lemmy.world Support or email info@lemmy.world. For other questions check our partnered communities list, or use the search function.
6) No US Politics.
Please don't post about current US Politics. If you need to do this, try !politicaldiscussion@lemmy.world or !askusa@discuss.online
Reminder: The terms of service apply here too.
Partnered Communities:
Logo design credit goes to: tubbadu
view the rest of the comments
The only one I ever had break was one I accidentally smacked pretty hard perpendicular to the USB port it was in, and I'm still not 100% sure if it was the port or the stick that broke. It sure scrambled the directory listing in the file manager though. Lots of funny characters.
Pretty sure the port took damage because it didn't work well with other things plugged in afterwards, and I've never used the stick again in case it's turned into a port killer. That probably just me being paranoid though.
I think the real danger might be write cycles. Super cheap ones might run to only a few tens of thousands of writes per cell and might even do no wear-levelling, bringing that down further. Nonetheless, as I understand it, they usually lose write-ability before read-ability, so in theory you'd be able to get data off one you couldn't write to any more. (In practice might be a different matter.)
Actual physical lifespan ought to be more than that if it's in regular use. I have a 256MB one that was just shy of state of the art when I got it (must be coming up on 20 years old) and it still works fine. I don't use it often though, so that might be in more danger of old-age rather than data integrity problems.