TriX Loc: Raleigh, NC

Today, looking for some usable USB drives to do some win 11 migrations, I went through my container of old USB drives. Capacity varied from maybe 4GB to 32 GB and they were from a number of manufacturers (SanDisk, Lexar, PNY & unmarked. Of the 15 drives, 12 were good and usable and all contained data. I did open a few files from several around 2018, and the files and images were good and uncorrupted. Interestingly, the 3 bad drives were all 16 or 32 GB SanDisk. No idea how old as they wouldn’t open.

Now I know this is in no respect a controlled or significantly significant survey, but the one takeaway for me was, don’t use USB sticks as long term storage/backup media and expect them to retain valid data for a long period of time, something a number of us have been preaching for awhile. It did surprise me a bit about SanDisk since I’ve always used and trusted their SD cards. They’ve also had a stack of well publicized SSD failures recently, so maybe (or maybe not) the takeaway is that manufacturers who’ve mastered a technology may find it’s not trivial to move that tech (in this case NANDFlash) to a different media. In fairness, I’ve never had a SanDisk SD or Lexar CF card fail, but they occasionally do, which is why both my cameras have 2 slots and I write them simultaneously.

Longshadow Loc: Audubon, PA, United States

Wow.

ken_stern Loc: Yorba Linda, Ca

I agree & also continue to question their overall reliability but currently, I'm forced to use one -
A PNY 512GB containing 225GB worth of music all 24bit most with sampling rates of 192. I do of course have the data backed up on two separate hard drives

However - knock on wood - in three/four years of constant use no failures -- yet

Caribou Loc: St. Louis, MO

I don't like to rely on USB sticks for long-term storage. I currently rely on Seagate portable drives and I back up to a few different drives just in case. So far no failures. When I use USB sticks I avoid the cheap ones.

tcthome Loc: NJ

The only card I had fail was a Sandisk Extreme sd purchased at Best Buy. The thing is it doesn't get used that much. Only used as overflow when the CF as my main card is full & jpeg video which is almost never.