Not sure if coincidence or I should give up (on USB flash drives)
Hey Tilderinos.
I've been looking into buying several flash drives since my largest flash drive is a 32GB sandisk, and I use or interact with all the 3 major OSes, I use Linux on my desktop and on a secondary laptop, I use MacOS on a Macbook and everyone else I know uses Windows(So I'll need an exFAT drive for them).
My recent experience with flash drives though makes me more willing to trust my data to a system's RAM than to a flash drive. At least RAM wouldn't lure me into a false sense of security then spontaneously fail, I know that my data isn't going to last a reboot.
I've got 3 sandisk cruzer blades fail on me, once was an error on my part where I accidentally hit it with my knee while plugged into a device(device unharmed, the drive is dead), one time I upgraded the SSD on my SteamDeck and flashed the steamdeck recovery to an 8GB stick, it worked fine while restoring and it still can be read... it's stuck on read only and, Gparted, Windows formatter, Rufus, Mac's disk utility nor mkfs can make it reusable, I assume it entered read only because it tripped some "whoops I'm dying" thing like some SSDs have(from what I know). The last one is effectively a resistor that connects to a USB port, it heats up, SOMETIMES appears on PC, Linux can open it, copying things into it via Nautilus works albeit very slowly, then when I try to open the root of the flash drive it is stuck perpetually trying to load, when I unplug it and plug it back in again, I can see the folders but entering any of them immediately goes into the permanent loading state, mkdir, cd and ls can work on the drive... intermittently, but I'm treating it as dead.
This leaves me with only 2 other drives, my largest drive, is a 32GB Sandisk Ultra, and my smallest drive which has been more reliable than the Cruzer Blades is a 4GB Sony... USM4GP thing, which I have no idea what year it was from and a quick googling didn't bring up any release date, but it had faster read/write than the cruzer blades, and it's been my main drive for things like installing an OS/burning an image into it yet it lasted all these years.
I'm trying to get a USB-C drive specifically since all my laptops that are in use and my PC have a USB-C port, but all I see in local big retailers are Sandisk, Sandisk and more Sandisk, Amazon however has some that aren't Sandisk.
Does anyone know a USB-C flash drive that is genuinely reliable? Was it specifically Cruzer Blades that is garbage? I've not had a Sandisk SD card fail on me yet, should I just avoid Sandisk for anything but SD cards? Should I just say fuck it and buy a bunch of enclosures and NVMe drives?
I've read that flash drives get bottom of the barrel NAND chips that can't be used on SSDs, too. I know that flash drives aren't meant for long term storage/backup but a drive that old shouldn't be still going on that strongly against new ones.
I've been looking at PNY Elite V3 with USB-C as a connector that I've seen a few listings on Amazon but it's 1TB price is almost the same price as a 1TB NVMe SSD(Though not factoring in the enclosure).
Former data recover tech here who used to fix (or attempt to fix, since many were unfixable) dozens of USB flash drives a month. IME, the vast vast vast majority of them are absolute garbage, and always have been, even the brand name ones. The only exception to that are the various ruggedized models, but they're usually quite costly, only marginally better build quality, and will still inevitably break eventually too. So, IMO you're far better off just buying an enclosure for a 2.5 SSD or M.2 NVMe drive. The major advantage of going that route is the drives themselves are less likely to actually break, so even when the enclosure inevitably does you can usually just buy a new one, swap the old drive into it, and keep your data. There are thousands of options out there, but I've personally had good experiences with Silverstone and Sabrent enclosures, but even Ugreen isn't bad either, TBH.
What manufacturers would you trust for low-end M.2 drives? Looking at PC Part Picker, the first semi-reputable option I see is a WD Green 240GB for $28. But does WD even make their own SSDs or just relabel someone else's?
Intel and Samsung models pop up around the $35 mark, but I think most of their product line is higher end and will be way on the other side of the spectrum.
Seconding what @Greg said. I haven't had any reliability issues with any of the major name brands.
AFAIK, WD never technically made any SSDs themselves. Sandisk (which is a subsidiary of WD) has always been their NAND OEM, even before they acquired them 10 years ago. I have 2x WD Black NVMe's (which have "Sandisk" clearly printed on the chips) in my current computer and they've performed perfectly. Although WD recently announced they were "exiting" the SSD market entirely though, so even that WD rebranding is likely going to go away and it will all just be straightforward Sandisk branded drives from now on.
I buy a fair amount more drives than the average person, and I’d have no major reliability concerns buying from any of the brands you’ve likely heard of (Crucial/Kingston/Samsung/Western Digital/Seagate/Sabrent/Lexar/probably a couple of others I’ve missed). As long as you don’t get a counterfeit (looking at you, Amazon), and don’t buy something from an all-caps-no-vowels brand that’s sourcing their flash from the waste pile behind a chip fab (looking at you again, Amazon third party sellers), you should be fine.
You might not be getting great value right at the bottom end of the market - random write performance in particular (copying thousands of small files, rather than a few big files) can be 500% better for a 50% price increase - but that’s comparing to other SSDs. If you’re replacing a USB flash drive even the cheapest SSD should be a decent improvement, and if you’re only copying a few GB at a time you’ll never have time to notice it’s “slow” regardless of write patterns.
I’m normally a bit more concerned about performance than is relevant here, but for what it’s worth most of what I do end up getting is Samsung or Crucial (which is just Micron with a consumer-friendly hat on) and they’ve always been solid - that’s also less a question of brand loyalty and more because the two largest manufacturers of actual flash chips seem to do a good job of hitting the price/performance sweet spot for assembled drives! I grabbed a couple of WD drives the other day because they were on sale and didn’t think twice about it, for example.
Do you look for DRAM or TLC?
I always take into account what kind of cells they use and may omit DRAM if the price difference is big. QLC is generally a no go if there are other options.
I tend to compare on IOPS if I'm looking to get an idea of performance between drives - it gives you a single number to compare when scrolling through a list, sequential performance is rarely a bottleneck, and I find IOPS is a better real world measure of what to expect than trying to balance the relative impact of controller type, DRAM cache, SLC cache, and NAND type. Something like the WD SN7100 is a good example that looks like it should be middling performance based on the lack of DRAM, but actually comes close to the Samsung 990 Pro in most real world tests even though it's 30% cheaper, which is a lot easier to see if you're comparing price/IOPS.
I'll go deeper and look up actual benchmarks of a specific drive if performance is critical, but like @bitwaba said, even the basic performance numbers are probably not worth worrying about for a pseudo USB stick. There's a whole other can of worms around USB-NVMe bridge chips there if you're actually trying to maximise performance, too, so unless you're planning on booting from it or running a database on there or something like that, almost anything on the market should be fine here.
I may repurpose one of them if I upgrade the storage in the enclosure down the line and have a machine that could use an NVMe SSD, that’s what I’ve been doing with my SD cards.
I’ve had a terrible experience with a QVO SATA SSD once and that pretty much soured me on using QLC SSDs again(esp when you consider that TLC SSDs aren’t that far apart in price), while DRAM feels not that necessary anymore with HMB being a thing(Not something you can use on an enclosure anyway).
Though I never considered to look into the iops before, just the type of NAND and DRAM/HMB.
Not the person you asked, but personally for me, on a USB stick replacement neither DRAM nor TLC would be necessary. They might provide some benefit in speed if you're writing multiple hundreds of gigs at a time as part of your USB workload, but I don't think it would be worth the price difference.
I got an enclosure (Arion Strix) but the NVMe that wad supposed to go in it has been placed in my PC when I was building it, I’ve been waiting for a really good deal on SSDs since last year but nothing significant from what I’ve seen. I didn’t have the foresight at the time to buy more than 1 980 Pro when they went on sale here.
It only occurred to me recently that I’m not sure if using SSDs externally would cause issues with trim/garbage collecting or not.
I apologize if I’m asking something I shouldn’t but what’s your worst experience at your data recovery job? Even though I’m somehow who’s tech literate I can’t imagine how unpleasant that can be on a daily basis.
For some reason I thought this question was from a different comment, which is why I didn't answer it first time around. :P
Honestly, it was a great job and there wasn't much unpleasantness. Very very occasionally clients would get angry and a bit verbally abusive when we couldn't recover their data, or the price of doing so was going to be more than they could afford... but I thankfully didn't have to deal with that side of the business since I was mostly just in the cleanroom or at my workstation and only had to interact with clients to get an initial understanding of what data they wanted recovered, or get clarifications from them later.
Not necessarily "unpleasant" in the same sense, but I did encounter a few absolutely heartbreaking situations while I worked there. Like the PhD student who lost his dissertation when he accidentally drove over his thumb drive, which had the only up-to-date copy of it since all the other copies they had were months behind. Or the small business that had a shit IT person who thought RAID was adequate data backup, and when the array went kaput and failed to rebuild they lost absolutely all their client data and business records. Both of those jobs I worked unpaid overtime on because of how bad I felt for them, but despite that we were still unfortunately unable to recover any data for them. :(
I've never encountered any TRIM/garbage collection issues with any SSDs or NVMes in external enclosures or even when hooking them up via USB adapters/docks for data recovery purposes... but YMMV if you buy an enclosure with some sort of hardware data management or RAID feature. All bets are off in those cases. ;)
What do you think about something like this? Does running RAID 1 even make sense nowadays?
Kinda funny timing, since I just mentioned RAID enclosures in another comment:
RAID 1 actually does kinda make sense for that setup (theoretically) if the data you plan on storing on those drives is vital. However, another thing to consider is that if the drives you put in there are the same model bought at the same time from the same source, they're very likely going to be from the same production batch... and I think most people would be surprised at how often drives from the same batch will fail at nearly identical times if run together in tandem. Which, IME, is one of the biggest causes of RAID array failures... and array rebuilding failures too, since multiple drives from the same batch will sometimes fail during the rebuilding process, which can really fuck your data up!
So that RAID 1 setup is likely not as bulletproof as you might think. "RAID = Redundancy NOT Backup" is a maxim for good reason. And even with that enclosure, I would still make sure to follow standard the 3-2-1 backup strategy: At least 3 copies of the data, on at least 2 different storage media or devices, with at least 1 copy stored offsite.
I like how I went from “Why are flash drives so bad” to actually consider backing up more seriously.
Isn’t the conventional wisdom to avoid using SSDs for vital data? Which is on the other hand is funny cause someone I know someone who recently went through having their own NAS with TrueNAS and they told me to just go with SSDs.
The old PC I used for Navidrome as well is in my bedroom and only has 2 3.5 drive bays, not accounting for other solutions such as mounting them on places like the fan slots.
Whether I go with HDDs or SSDs, the offsite copy will most likely be a massive 16TB+ HDD that I leave at a friend’s house.
Talking outside my area of experience but I feel that RAID=Backup misconception stems from
1-People not backing up their things in general so their understanding of a backup is superficial.
2-Not accounting for PEBKAC, you can mirror your files between 2 drives. Amounts to nothing if you overwrite the file(Happened to me a few times that I started to version things in the rare occasions I work on a big thing).
3-Sort of includes 2 but not having had went through such a scenario before, I once formatted the drive that has whatever files I had from pre 2010-ish and only realized that after the fact. Thankfully it’s nothing that important but I got nothing to reflect back to around that time of the weird shit I used to do.
That's still a decent general guideline to follow since, like 0x29A said, when SSDs fail they can fail HARD and render your data unrecoverable (unless you want to spend a small fortune getting it recovered). However, SSDs have come a long way from the old days in terms of their reliability, so I personally have no qualms about using them for storing my own vital data. Although I also obsessively back up my data and routinely verify those backups' integrity, and so people who are lax about either of those may want to think twice about using SSDs as the primary (and especially as their sole) storage medium for any of their vital data.
Honestly there's no flash drive I would trust as more than a transfer medium or a immediate use os installation media. I wouldn't trust them as backups and I certainly wouldn't trust them as primary active storage.
The most frequently used flash drive I have is some 8GB drive from the early 10s as most of the newer drives I've gotten have failed.
+1 to the other comments here- so sorry for sounding like I'm just repeating what they're saying- but I fully agree- While I have had some USB flash drives last years and years, it seems to be sheer luck and due to intermittent usage, so I'm not stressing them. There's a ton of garbage in the market, and even what seem to be the better of the flash drives still aren't resilient devices I would trust for any long-term storage. Only temporary use (installations, small transfers, other cases where they are left in-place and read occasionally for a particular reason like my Unraid server, etc) and even then I often find I prefer external SSDs for these situations too- SSDs are much much faster than even decent flash drives, which also reduces frustration.
For external storage, I strongly prefer external SSDs (either made for purpose, or enclosures I put my own drives in), while not immune to failure, decent SSDs have a pretty good track record overall. SSDs can still fail, and fail HARD, and often unrecoverably (at least for a reasonable price), but it's far less of a gamble
Flash drives ultimately are made with the cheapest of materials and components and there isn't really a focus on longevity at all. It's possible some older drives were built better (wouldn't surprise me as every company these days, and for a long time, often have been racing to the bottom), but I think in general, USB flash lifespans are just a form of gambling. I've had expensive ones fail, I've had cheap ones survive, I've had multiple middle-of-the-road ones encounter both of those fates- there seems to be no rhyme or reason.
You do still have to be careful when buying pre-built external SSDs (or really, ANY SSD)- I would typically avoid extremely no-name brands, as a previous help desk / desktop support tech, I've encountered all sorts of wild stuff- including some too-good-to-be-true priced external SSD that we opened up because it was failing and looked inside- and it was literally a USB2 flash drive taped inside of an enclosure, with a USB3 conversion board connected to it- to make the outside of the "SSD" appear to be USB3, etc.
That's why I tend to avoid buying pre-built externals myself, and don't generally recommend them to people, especially since even the name brands occasionally pull similar shenanigans... Not quite as bad as using flash drives inside them, but they do often attempt to get rid of their older, unsold internal drive stock by plopping them into external/portable drive enclosures.
Although on the opposite end of the spectrum, if you do your research you can sometimes get excellent drives for cheaper than they would normally cost. E.g. A few years ago when I built my latest desktop PC I managed to get a WD 12TB platter drive for it for significantly less money than it would normally cost by buying a WD Elements external that had the drive inside it, then taking the enclosure apart. ;)
Ah yes, the art of "shucking" - this was quite a phenomenon at one point, and perhaps still is. I bought a stack of external drives (6x 8TB iirc) from Best Buy to load up a NAS. Some manufacturers would even honor the HDD warranty after this.
But there were all kinds of shenanigans, unfortunately. On the manufacturer side, sometimes it was roulette as to what the internal drive would actually be. On the consumer side, some assholes would put their old drives, or literally bricks, into the newly purchased external enclosure and return it as if it was broken (or sometimes "unused" if they did the DIY shrink wrap trick).
I’ve had only 1 try at shucking a drive, a small WD elements for a friend was acting up and I tried to remove it to see if the connections were acting up or if they drive itself is dead.
It was a soldered PCB with Micro USB connection instead of having a SATA to USB converter so I sort of gave up on the idea of shucking a drive if the interface is gonna be a gamble and I’d need to research every drive beforehand.
Yeah, that's perhaps the biggest gamble of all. There's even been some instances where the same SKU has some like this and some not. But people always find some identifier to determine if this is or isn't the case - as you said, just depends on how much research is worth the potential savings.
Yeah, I've heard some horror stories about shucking too which is why it's always a bit of gamble even when you do your research. But the same issues can be encountered with any prebuilt external drive... which, again, is why I don't generally recommend people (esp laymen) buy them rather than going the custom enclosure route. At least with the custom enclosure you know exactly what drive is inside it, because you're the one that put it in there. :P
I think we could give better advice if we knew what we were using these drives for.
If you're frequently transferring files between one computer and another, or using these flash drives for backup, you're much better off with a NAS. It's a higher up-front investment, but it will change your workflow massively for the better.
If you're just using these drives for installation media or the occasional transfer, you're probably fine to just keep buying USB drives. Yeah it sucks that they fail so frequently, but their form factor is very convenient and they're pretty cheap.
I use an external NVME drive enclosure personally because I do image processing that generates tens of GB of scratch files per operation that I don't want on my main computer, but I still need fast read/write speeds. This is the enclosure that I use: https://www.hypershop.com/products/hyperdrive-next-usb4-nvme-ssd-enclosure
Most of my use for flash drives are for transferring files, I don’t hop distros or change OSes as much as before but my 32GB is doubling as a ventoy and file transfer USB flash drive, I had to copy files from someone at work and the 4GB drive wasn’t enough, I’ve also been thinking of getting something newer with USB-C because it should be faster but whenever I look into it I ask myself if I should just use SSDs instead, a larger USB could be used for a longer term storage too, but at some point their prices get close to MVMes.
I’ve got an old PC I thought of turning into a NAS, I even got a HexOS license back when it was $99, but what’s stopping me from committing is that I’d want something with expandability in mind, the case only has 2 HDD bays, and optimally(at least for HexOS) you want at least 3, one I assume is used for parity.
There’s also the price of HDDs, I’ve been considering buying some from serverpartdeals but they’re still fairly expensive, and there’s the whole “Do you want used storage?”(I see a lot of people online vouching for it though), I need more SATA connectors and honestly a bit of time.
Setting up NextCloud when I tried to use it a long tjme ago was a nightmare too and I have up on it.
That old PC has been used as a Navidrome server and I tried Ollama on it a bit, it’s running off 2 SSDs(120GB for boot/Ubuntu Server and a 1TB for data) but I’ve had boot issues with it the past few days and neither the motherboard nor the GPU want to display something for me to know what the problem is.
I’ve been trying to USB-Cfy most of my equipment and that enclosure looks pretty cool, Ideally I look for anything that supports Thunderbolt to future proof(and to guarantee minimum specs) but both my PC motherboard and Mac support up to 40GB/s USB4 only. Pretty pricey compared to other options but also the other ones are USB 3.2.
While not quite as cheap as the cheapest flash drives, I've personally had great luck with SD cards and whatever cheap SD USB adapter I have laying around. My computers all end up treating them the same as any other USB stick, plus they're implicitly compatible with SD devices. A good thing about this setup is that even if you break the cheap adapter your data is fine because your data durability should be tied to the quality of your chosen SD card instead.
My switch toward doing this was unintentional. Between phones, pis, Steam Deck, etc. I'd started to acquire SD cards and they weren't all simultaneously in use. I also had the adapter already for pi projects and stuff, but eventually I noticed I'd begun to use it directly as a storage interface rather than only as an installation tool.
It's also nice that if I do want a bigger one for using like a flash drive I can either temporarily back up one of my in-use ones or use it as an excuse to upgrade something else. For example, if I temporarily need 1TB of USB storage I can choose between another hard drive or using it to validate an upgrade to my SteamDeck.
I’ve only had 1 SD Card fail one me ever, a 64GB Toshiba, and it only seemed to fail or to have degraded performance this year.
I like your idea but SDs got way too large than their speeds can handle, a 1TB SD card is pretty sweet until you need to copy the content of your previous 512GB SD card.
Transferring to a higher capacity is something I had to do fairly often since I tend to pass down older cards to other devices whenever I upgrade any SD card.
Yeah, the efficacy of SD cards largely lies in the sizes and workloads you're going for. I wouldn't really recommend them for huge loads and they probably won't be the most cost effective for such cases anyway. Most of the SD cards I have in USB-usage rotation are rather small by today's standards. Big stuff tends to go to NAS or even just directly transfer between devices over network.
Anecdotally they still work fine for me on my workloads that involve moving work around between multiple computers, but importantly I'm normally working with rather small changes at a time rather than a lot of full copies. The frequency at which I transfer 20+GB files is so low that it's a consideration largely ignored by me.
Aside from the more reliable alternatives people have already suggested, I still find myself using flash drives occasionally. Since you mentioned Amazon, one possible issue is getting low quality fakes, which seems like possible issue when buying flash memory like this drives and sd cards online. I'm still willing to buy from Amazon, but I'll test speed and capacity from at least one of the pack to ensure I've received something that meets the specs of what I ordered. The utility I used to test capacity was "H2testw," which seems to basically write a file taking up the entire space of the drive then check it for validity.
This should improve, as Amazon is retiring their commingling program this year.
I will believe it when I see it. I know what they've said, i know why they've said it, but I also know they did it because it makes them money and I seriously doubt there's enough pressure for them to really make the effort to fix this.
I really, really like enclosures + Intel optane drives. A decent enclosure is $15-20 and the drives can be had for $3-10 on ebay (for 16GB). Certainly expensive by flash drive standards, but you get what you pay for. High speed, high endurance drives.
One thing of note, and probably someone else knows the answer, I'm uncertain how long SSDs/nvmes can go unpowered before bitrot sets in.
I’ve read into Optane before and it’s kinda messy, compatibility and the many different versions of the drives, I was looking into whether SLC SSDs are still a thing at the time.
Excellent question — this is something that often gets misunderstood, even among tech enthusiasts.
Short answer:
Consumer SSDs and NVMe drives can typically remain unpowered for about 1 to 2 years at room temperature (around 25 °C / 77 °F) before there’s a non-trivial risk of data degradation (“bit rot”). But that time can drop sharply with higher temperatures or lower-grade NAND.
⸻
⚙️ Detailed Explanation
Why unpowered SSDs lose data
SSDs store data as electric charges in NAND flash cells. Over time, these charges leak — and without power, the drive can’t refresh or correct them. Once charge levels drift too far, bits flip.
⸻
JEDEC Retention Standards
The JEDEC standard (the one SSD manufacturers follow) defines retention requirements for NAND:
Use case Expected retention (unpowered) Notes
Consumer / Client SSDs 1 year at 30 °C (86 °F) After the drive’s rated write endurance is used up
Enterprise SSDs 3 months at 40 °C (104 °F) At end of life; data centers rarely power off drives
New / lightly used drives Several years (often 3–10+) Because fresh cells hold charge longer
So a new SSD stored cool and dry can easily last 3–5 years unpowered. But an old or heavily used drive may start losing data after a few months to a year, especially if it’s kept warm.
⸻
Temperature Effects
Temperature has an exponential effect on data retention:
• For every 10 °C rise, retention time roughly halves.
• For example:
• 25 °C → maybe ~2 years
• 35 °C → ~1 year
• 45 °C → ~6 months
Keep SSDs below 20 °C (68 °F) if you plan long-term storage.
⸻
NAND Type Matters
• SLC: 5–10 years easily
• MLC: 2–5 years
• TLC: 1–3 years
• QLC: potentially <1 year if worn or hot
⸻
Mitigation Tips
If you need to store an SSD or NVMe long-term:
✅ Store in a cool, dry environment (ideally 15–20 °C / 59–68 °F)
✅ Use anti-static bags or airtight containers with desiccant
✅ Power on the drive once a year and read all data (this triggers ECC correction and remapping)
✅ Keep multiple copies, ideally on different media types (e.g., HDD + SSD + cloud)
⸻
🔍 Practical Summary
Condition Safe Unpowered Duration Notes
New SSD, cool storage (~20 °C) 3–5 years Usually safe
Used SSD, cool storage (~20 °C) 1–2 years Power it on annually
Warm or hot environment (>35 °C) <1 year Risk rises fast
Enterprise QLC or TLC at EOL Weeks–months Don’t rely on it
⸻
-Chatgtp
I've been quite happy with my Samsung 256GB usb-c drive, bought straight from them.
However, I also endorse the USB 3.2 NVME enclosure for anything substantial.
If you want to test the write/read for external drives, navigate to that drive in your terminal then run
For a USB3 drive, it'll return something like this
which is
Definitely go the M.2 NVMe + enclosure route like cfabbro said.
I bought 64GB Kingston HyperX mayn years back, it is USB3.something and can do write 170MB/s sequential and read at double that. This is why I paid extra, the true performance and also.longevity. But they don't make them anymore.
Nowadays I would buy NVME SSD and enclosure. That would make it perform absolutely great while also making it reliable. It is costly, true. But you get what you pay for.
If you want to go cheaper, I would think about usinf microSD card permanently inside a USB-stick-like reader. That way you can control speed and reliability (by buying cheaper or better cards). The least reliable part would likely be the reader though. Also not cheap as USB sticks, but once again it hase its pros.
Still, NVME + enclosure FTW.
I think you accidentally made a new top-level comment instead of replying to @DistractionRectangle (who asked the question about SSD bitrot).
Thx for the heads up. I’ve had deleted and updating based on your awesome feedback!