Inquiries on USB Flash Drives and Micro SD Cards

[Frank-0-Video]

Greetings ....

Seeking information about reliability and long-term usage -- including as data archives -- concerning USB flash drives and micro SD cards.

Any replies to this will not need to say much about costs, as I have already seen that one external non-ssd hard drive with, say, 2 TB capacity, will be easier on the wallet than the purchase of however many flash drives or micro SD cards are needed to equal such capacity.

So, replies can focus on the drives and micro SD cards that are consistently among the most reliable for both everyday use, as well as for long term data storage.

Thanx-A-Lotte, Frank-0-Video

[ozymango]

Hi, Frank-O-Video. Well I've got over a dozen SanDisk brand SD cards of various capacities (up to 64gb) that I've used in cameras, camcorders, phones, e-readers, whatever, and I've not had a single failure of any of these cards in all the years I've had them. I pop them in and out of various devices on (I think) an average level, about what I suppose most people would do, not tons of swapping out but downloading various pix and videos from the card to a computer on a semi-regular basis, and again, no issues with any of my SD cards. That being said I suspect pretty much any decent hi-capacity SD these days is pretty reliable these days.

But as for long-term data storage, while I love my SD cards, for true archiving I still stick with spinner drives, and multiple spinner drives at that -- I do three backups myself for all really important files, at least one drive off-site. I love SSDs for computer OS, so much faster, but I do not rely on any of my SSD drives for critical data storage, I have had several SSDs fail absolutely on me with no warning. My go-to drives for long-term data storage are WD Red drives, whatever capacity, spinner drives that I swap out in my NAS. Haven't had a WD Red drive failure since I stated using these drives, many years ago now.

[GAhere]

for "archival" purposes, I would highly recommend skipping ANY solid state devices (SSDs, Flash memory cards AND especially USB thumb drives)..

I have had multiple USB thumb drives suffer from sudden drop dead no longer readable condition, I have also seen SSD drives with no warning just fail and I have also seen flash memory cards get corrupted and must be reformated to make them usable again (of coarse losing ALL data that was on them).

If the data is important to you, then it is better to stick with more conventional spinner drives, however don't put all the "eggs" in one basket by spreading the risk. Have at least two different means of storing the data.

IE spinner and DVD/BR, spinner and "cloud", multiple spinner drives setup in a "raid 1" MINIMUM (this is a pair of identical drives that are mirrored via hardware interface and the same data is written to both drives at the same time).

Never choose RAID 0, there is no redundancy to the data and if one drive fails you lose ALL data.

There are external USB drive enclosures and NAS (Network Attached Storage) that offer RAID1 or even RAID 5 (minimum three drives for RAID 5 that give a means to rebuild the array in the even of one failed drive in the array.

Something else to consider, USB flash drives and memory cards like SD are highly faked, especially in the larger capacity versions, these are often smaller capacity drives that have had the size bit manipulated to make them appear to be larger than they are. They work OK until you hit the real size they are and then the drive will become corrupted and unreadable.

Something else no one talks about is flash drives can switch from read/write to read only if the data you send to it exceeds the available space..

[ProJiJi]

Much like ozymango, I also have used all sorts of brands of USB sticks over the years and have only had trouble with some older ones that had MP4 stored and some of those have gone sort of weird on the sides with flashing stuff. But that has been rare.

Lately I have stuck to using the Bic Camera standards from Buffalo made in Taiwan, 64GB. I've had no trouble with those, but that is here in Japan and I am not so sure if those are sold in North America or the EU.

But along the same thoughts as GAhere, I don't rely only on USB sticks. I also use HDD and SSD for storage/backup. I only use those little SD cards for data movement, when needed. Some reason those SD cards worry me for any other purpose.

And I have this weird worry about outside "waves" bothering stuff, so I have made special enclosure type "boxes" (or sort of) using aluminum foil (super thick kind) and hope if there is some nasty solar flare, or other weird something, my stored/backup stuff will survive. I studied about that some years ago and it seemed those science type folks felt if you did a good wrapping with quality aluminum foil, you would save your data from that bad stuff. But "good wrapping" is the key. Like double wrapping and such.

[GAhere]

Redundancy is key to good archival storage.

One company I worked for was a chain of hardware stores, I worked in the computer configuration and repair section for all of the point of sale and backoffice equipment that was the company sold to it's store members.

EVERY system included in the computer hardware/software package include a tape backup system and software to manage the backups. Each night the entire system was fully backed up to a different tape (7 tapes for a 7 day rotation). Next morning the store manager would change and rotate backup tapes. End of day the manager was supposed to take the previous nights backup tape with them..

More than once having that offsite backup tape became extremely important..

Had stores that had hardware failure of the server, theft and or physical damage to the server (water/storm/fire). We were often able to setup a new system and restore the data from the offsite backup copy and have it shipped to the store owner within 48 hrs so all of the accounting data, inventory, and ledger info up to the date of the backup was not lost.

Another company I worked for used RAID 5 redundant drive arrays PLUS an additional external HD backup or instead of external drive it would backup to a different network drive (also RAID 5 or better) that was located in a different server room.

Redundancy is your friend, use two different means of storage, but don't depend solely on flash memory devices (IE solid sate), USB drives do not have "spare" storage cells in the even that a storage cell stops working. SSDs do have spare storage cells and are more robust than USB flash drives but even so SSDs can fail with no warning and when they fail pretty much near zero chance of retrieving that data stored in them. Spinners do fail, however there are often warning signs like funny noises or random slow read/writes with a lot of clicking so you have a fighting chance to get your data off before failure.