I'm wondering how much of my info I should entrust to memory sticks. I'm curious to hear first-hand failure accounts.
Also, if the answer is "no", that would be interesting too.
Has a USB memory stick ever failed on you?
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Re: Has a USB memory stick ever failed on you?
#2I have used dozens over the last few years and none of them have failed. Granted some of the cheapo 512 MB ones I got for free at work I only used a dozen or so times before I lost them, so I don't know how long they would have held up if I used them over and over again over a long period of time. But I had a Lacie XTreme Key I used for everything daily from work, school, library and it never failed. I lost it before it failed, so I guess I am more of a threat to my data than the memory stick.
Re: Has a USB memory stick ever failed on you?
#3I've had one failure on an old 256MB Sandisk--after a few years it would corrupt files. Probably just worn out, as it got used quite a bit.
We buy really cheap 1 and 2GB flash drives at work for promotional handouts. I'd say maybe 4-8 out of every 100 are DOA and need to be returned. Don't know if the good ones are holding up a year or two later.
I recently received a new (Lexar?) drive and it would work fine until I got a few hundred MB on it, and then I started seeing corrupt files and other weird errors. I should try and RMA it.
Re: Has a USB memory stick ever failed on you?
#4Had two fail. And also have broken two. Use Dropbox instead where possible.
Re: Has a USB memory stick ever failed on you?
#5I have a 4GB Sony (I think) that I bought a few years ago. It has always corrupted bits of data here and there (think a few dozen lines of random noise in the middle of some code) so I pretty quickly learned not to use it for most things. It now holds mp3s for my car, which fails much more gracefully with garbled input than a compiler does.
But it was cheap and relatively high capacity for its time, so I wouldn't take much from that other than "you get what you pay for".
Re: Has a USB memory stick ever failed on you?
#6yes, I had an 8GB cheap stick (15 euro) that failed after some time. uploading worked for the firs 4gb or so, everything above that ended with an file size of zero or corrupted data.
Re: Has a USB memory stick ever failed on you?
#7I was doing some low level tech support for an on campus group during college. I set up a simple samba network share for everyone to trade documents on and then set up a really simple backup system. (daily diffs burned to cd, weekly full copies on an external moved off site).
However I couldn't convince one of the departments to use it. Their manager insisted that it was insecure (since i, as admin, would have access to their data). so instead they traded data back and forth on 2 flash drives.
Needless to say, one day they lost a ton of work on one of the drives and i was told to recover the data....
i don't do tech support anymore...
Re: Has a USB memory stick ever failed on you?
#8I had a 2GB Sony drive fail on me right as I was about to back it up. Worked on one machine, took it out, plugged it into another machine and it was dead.
Re: Has a USB memory stick ever failed on you?
#9I've had two fail on me over the years. One is a 1GB stick that only shows some weird size that reformatting won't even fix, and the other was a 2GB that completely died. After finding Dropbox though, I no longer carry a flash drive unless I'm giving a presentation and want a backup in case the internet is down.
Re: Has a USB memory stick ever failed on you?
#10I recently bought a 16GB Corsair Padlock2 secure memory stick, and the first unit was DOA. I did a RMA, and the replacement has been fine. I think that the first got damaged during shipping.
I had also bought a 4GB PNY memory stick a few months ago that would corrupt data. I detected it because I was PGP-encrypting the contents, but the signature would not verify upon copying to another machine. I tried several times, then reformatted several times, then tried a few more times before returning the stick for a replacement (in-store return this time).
I have had about a dozen sticks otherwise that seem to work perfectly, but I don't really trust them. I also use Dropbox (love, love, love it), several external USB drives, and a NAS for backups.