Ask Lemmy

How long does a decent USB stick last?

Until you store indecent stuff on it.

4GB

The first usb stick I bought more than 15 years ago, still works.

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.

I've had some for 10 years+.

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

I’ve quite literally never had one fail even under heavy abuse.

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.

I tried several random cheap sticks recently and they all died within a year.

A funny story: In my second grade at school, I got gifted a 4gb stick for winning something related to IT, it was around 2009. It worked all this time as a distro stick, until my PC couldn't see it anymore. I thought it died, but I tried it a year after and it magically works again now

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

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.

In my experience, they last until you look at the capacity a few years and several changes of use down the line and end up giving to someone for some weird reason with a single MS document filling it up.

I still use one I bought in 2007.

Obviously there will be backups, but I also don't want to lose anything on it as much as possible.

Don't rely on a USB stick for that, no matter the brand, at least based on my personal experience.

Can be years, but it's as much luck and storage conditions as anything else. Luck being that batch of components not having one tiny error, or the box not being dropped by a guy loading the truck.

Get 2 backups from 2 different high end companies. Store them somewhere cool and dark with little to no moisture, in a static bag. So a ziploc with a silica gel packet in a safe in a basement. Or even in a fake soda can in the back of your fridge.

Really depends. what manufacturer, price, how often they're used and type (type A, type C, micro USB, etc). I've had some still work after a decade, others have suddenly failed months after I bought them

Buy one with square USB on one end, USB-C on the other, then if one fails you still have the other interface. The more reputable companies are better in this market. $17 should get you 128gb here

I have seen only a single usb stick die

It was a 2GB one bought a very long time ago

I have some 1gb sticks that are about to turn 20 years old.

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.

It's pretty random.

Carried a LaCie IAmAKey on my keychain for 10 years before it died. Probably used it a dozen times.

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.

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.

I can't say what is the usual failure rate as my drives fail in like 3 months or years but dont buy kingston datatravel 3.0 both died in a month and one of the replacements died in one month, and the second one is still going. They were used to transfer some files beetween computers and as ventoy drives for when windows breaks or I break my current distro.