How Long Should a Thumb Drive Last?

For a couple of reasons, I tend to keep about five or six thumb drives around for the sake of having non-disc copies of bootable software, and also a quick place to backup small, but important data. OS-wise, I keep a thumb drive with a Windows 7 install on it at all times, along with Gentoo, and Ubuntu. Then I have Ultimate Boot CD and also Acronis True Image. I prefer disc-less versions for the sake of both performance and the fact that not all of our test PCs have an optical drive – it’s the ultimate solution, as far as I’m concerned.

But I do have one problem with thumb drives – their life spans. Granted, I use my thumb drives quite often, and in the case of the one that just died on me, I reformatted it many times due to keeping different OS installs on it. But exactly how long is a thumb drive meant to last? This particular model, Kingston’s DataTraveler 100G2, lasted me about one year. I got it last summer, have used it as my main thumb drive since for these purposes, and today, it’s dead as a doornail.

Here’s a couple of quick screenshots to show you just how dead:

In this shot, the drive is being read as a USB 1.1 drive, not USB 2.0 which it is. Benchmarking it provides an even more humorous result:

That’s right – it’s so slow (in this case, unable to be written to in any reliable manner), it can’t even be benchmarked. Hoping that it could have been a file system issue of some sort, I’ve reformatted it more than once, but no cigar. It’s dead, Jim.

To be clear, even though I’m talking about a Kingston drive here, I am not stating that its thumb drives are worse off than others out there. I’ve had these same sort of issues with Corsair and OCZ just the same. Problems like these seem to be an inherent nature of the beast.

For those of you who use thumb drives frequently, have you ever had this sort of thing happen? And if so, how long does a thumb drive tend to last you?