flash drives life spand?

Hey people. Just wondering...what is the average life span of a flash drive? I know hdd can vary cuz they actually have moving parts. A guess would be fine too haha.

 

I have never seen a flash drive go completely useless, have a 6 year old 64 MB pen drive which still works good.

But yeah its susceptible to physical damage. And once I saw a virus wipe off 30Gig of my HDD and I could never recover it back, maybe its possible with a pen drive too

 

you can get files back with unix based software like knoppix.
Usually the life span of a flash drive is dependent on three things:
1) how often you forget it in your pants pocket, when you do the laundry
2) how often you use the drive,
3) how organized you are.
I only mention 3) because most people loose their memory cards which results in obviously a shorter lifespan.

Usually most users will never burn out the read/write cycles on a usb memory stick, unless they use it as a backup, which is continually copied and read from 24/7.

most usb drives can withstand a few runs in the washing machine. Just make sure that the drive is completely dry before using it, or else you can short the usb device, or worse short the USB hub in your laptop/desktop.

I have a few cards which are 4 years old and they work fine to this day

K-TRON

 

I've honestly never heard of the life span of flash drives ever coming up before. The people I know usually get a new one not because the old dies, but because they want more space. So far, I have my flash drive still up and running after about 6 years. I'm thinking about getting a new one soon with a bigger capacity.

 

Oh ok. Thanks people. Yeah cuz my external hdd recently failed and it made me think about my other storage devices. And one of my other favorite is my flash drive. So it just made me wonder. Anyway the good thing about it is that mine is liftetime warranty so thats a good thing.

 

I usually buy new ones before old ones would die as well but I did have a Sandisk 256 mb thumb drive fail after a year. It was recognized but corrupted, so something in it burned out.

They definitely have a finite life though and the SSDs and flash cards have various numbers attached to them for life spans but I don't know how realistic those are.

 

i have two 8-gb sandisk drives i use to back my digital pictures, from 2000 to 2006 on one, and 2007+ on the other one. i copy all my files over to the drives, nicely organized, and keep them someplace in the house.

supposedly they last way longer than DVD/CD backups, but i will probably put them onto a new hardware in a few years when i will have a 1TB usb drive. =]

 

A flash drive should have a very, very long life span if your using it modestly. If you are running a boot off the USB constantly it may not last you as long, as memory DOES have a limit of read's/write's.

 

I had a lexar unit fail. But that might have had something to do with the case being broken first ....