Hardware Your longest lived USB flash drive.

[FAST6191]

Titles, I do like to make good representative ones.

Anyway depending upon the IT type you speak to then USB drives have a limited amount of time they live for. My 64 gig one is at the point where I do not want to rely on it to work when I get somewhere/store something that would be annoying to lose when I got somewhere so I thought I would ask others what their experiences are.

I do also have a 4 gig supposedly kingston one (I have since seen the shell get used by other things) I got in mid 2010 and has been a rock solid workhorse ever since -- documents, small files, drivers, PC fixing tools... the lot. It has been everywhere with me, on planes, on trains, on boats, that one time I got launched into space and in my pocket throughout it all. I had a bunch of them once but sold them, kind of wish I had not now.

 

[_v3]

I still have a 128 mb flash drive from 2004, it works better than the 16gb flash drives that I got with my laptop in 2010 (which tend to corrupt data really often and I'm actually thinking of tossing them out).

 

[Mr. Sparkle]

I have a 256mb lexar sport that I just bought. I bought it to deliver the payload to mod original Xboxes. Haven't gotten to use it for that yet because I used a different one first that was newer and 4gb. But it does work, and I believe it's over 10 years old...

 

[RustInPeace]

A 500MB Lexar Firefly from 2006 or 2007. I still use it, as it has my .txt files where I have certain things listed and documented, also where I save my movie reviews. It also has Kaspersky Rescue Disc, but that was for Windows XP, I don't know if it would work on Windows 10. It takes up the most space.

 

[Patxinco]

1GB Kingston from 2005 it think.
This one:

Spoiler

Works like the first day

 

[Pacheko17]

An 8gb kingston from 2013.

I never had to use a USB flash drive before 2013.

 

[Minox]

That'd probably be a 512MB SanDisk Cruzer Micro from 2003-2004. It might not store much and it's not too fast, but it still works.

 

[emmanu888]

256MB MaxDrive for the PS2. The USB drive that came included with the ARMAX: Evo Edition.

 

[Fishaman P]

I've never had a flash drive stop working on me, ever.
But my Sandisk Cruzer 8GB from ~2008 is pretty sluggish, so... I guess that counts?

 

[FAST6191]

Seems some of you got in on this flash drive lark quite early. Before about 2009, maybe 2008 it was cheaper around here to buy a SD card and SD card reader (or CD or smart or XD....) so I kind of missed out there.

 

[Minox]

Seems some of you got in on this flash drive lark quite early. Before about 2009, maybe 2008 it was cheaper around here to buy a SD card and SD card reader (or CD or smart or XD....) so I kind of missed out there.

I never had a CD burner back then so a 512MB USB drive was miles ahead of my old floppy disks.

 

[FAST6191]

Gah typo I meant CF.

But yeah CDs, even rewritables, were a pain so after floppy discs died it was an interesting few years for me for the day to day file transfers. Fortunately I never truly suffered at the hands of zip drives and I mostly only needed to do stuff on local networks/ones I had some kind of FTP into.

 

[jDSX]

My sandisk cuzers bought them 3 years ago 16gb and 32gb still working fine.

 

[VinsCool]

A kingston 2 gb usb key.
From 2008.

 

[Arecaidian Fox]

A 4GB Kingston from 2010 is my current longest lived one I have not lost. Used it for modding my Xbox 360 saves a lot until I misplaced it and used a different one. Found it recently and it works, but now it mostly sits around because of the 128GB PNY USB 3.0 flash drive I keep on my keychain

 

[Minox]

Seeing as it was right next to me I randomly decided to snap a picture of it to commemorate its long term of service. It has long lost its former rubbery cover, and if you look closely you can even see some dents here and there:

 

[Arecaidian Fox]

Seeing as it was right next to me I randomly decided to snap a picture of it to commemorate its long term of service. It has long lost its former rubbery cover, and if you look closely you can even see some dents here and there:

View attachment 30069

Sturdy little guy. Kind of rare to find good ones with a metal casing these days.

 

[HaloEffect17]

Kingston USB's are probably some of the best ones out there, durability wise.

 

[jinzokami]

nothing i own lasts more than a year. i've lost many a backed up save to a failed usb.

 

[The Real Jdbye]

I still have a 128 MB Cruzer flashdrive somewhere which was the first flash drive I got. I haven't seen it in ages, but it still worked last time I used it and I doubt it has spontaneously broken since then. It's probably in one of the boxes with my old stuff.
In fact, I don't think a single flashdrive has ever broken on me, though I never did use them heavily because the transfer speeds were much too slow. By the time flash drives started to get faster, my storage needs had outgrown the capacity of USB flash drives and I had moved on to external HDDs. Now I have plenty of SD cards laying around in various form factors so the occasional times I do need a flash drive for something (like reinstalling Windows) I can just stick a SD card in a USB reader and use that.