I am considering buying a large capacity pen dive to use for long-term back-up storage, with my Linux Mint desktop computers.

I have been browsing pen drives on a well-known international online retailer of books and other products. The price of the biggest capacity drives is only slightly more than the price of smaller drives.

One or two products appear to offer 1TB or 2TB, but when looking at the reviews they often say the product is defective in use or has a true capacity that is much less. The high-star reviews are by people who have not yet used or fully loaded the pendrive yet, or are for a completely different product.

1) In the actual experience of people who have actually tested or fully loaded their pendrive, what is the genuine maximum storage capacity of pendrives that I can expect to buy at the time of posting (April 2021)?

2) Is there any practical upper limit to the capacity that Linux can deal with?

3) I would re-format the drive so that it can store files of over 4GB, while still being Windows-compatible. Is that going to create any problems with Linux?

4) Are USB 3 drives compatible with old USB 2 sockets?

5) For how many years can I expect the pendrive to retain the information?

6) Is true that pendrives are not affected at all by electro-magnetic fields, X-rays, etc?

Question one is my main concern - I do not want the hassle and disappointment of sending something back and hopefully getting a refund, and annoyingly being forced to pay the return postage for a defective item.

Thanks.

6. Yes.

5. If you asking if I put the drive in a drawer and forgot about it how long will it take to degrade then it depends. Maybe 5 years.

4. Yes.

3. No. Linux has support for both NTFS and exFAT.

2. Not that I know.

1. If you purchase a name brand drive for around its listed price it should be the real thing. If it looks to good to be true it isn't. SanDisk lists their 1tb drive for ~170 US.

Thanks MichaelK for all your replies.

Since writing the above I have found this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y07B2DltlUs which has lots of comments about fake drives, and similar videos to the side.

It is a pity that even the products offered by the famous online book retailer cannot be trusted to match their description and that many of the reviews appear to be fake in one way or another. I thought the whole point of it was that it made buying online trustworthy

I only use pendrives up to 32GB personally, (& micro SD cards up to 64GB) - my back ups are stored on external HDDs.

My 2 cents.

Don't. They are not reliable enough for that. An external USB hard drive is a better solution. A 2TB USB3 HD can be had on Newegg for $60 or less. Hard drives are very reliable. They don't last forever, and every now and then one dies. But way more rugged/reliable than a little usb drive.

I would not trust them for anything vital. They may last for years. Good for carrying movies, or papers back and forth.

A little USB3 external hard drive will probably be good for 10-12 years if you don't bang it around. They come with NTFS on them. You can leave them that way. ntfs-3g will read-write them just fine. Then you can stick it into Linux, Windows, Mac, BSD and read the thing.

I Have used up to 64GB usb drives.

Thanks to all.

What worries me about external hard-drives is that they are susceptible to electro-magnetism, and would be mechanically fragile and also capable of wearing out. Another minor point is that they are much bigger and thus more likely to be seen and stolen by a burglar.

You need a big electromagnet to erase a hard drive. There not as fragile as you think but you don't want to bang them around either. I have physically broken flash drives so tend to agree with teckk

No thumbs. Get an ssd and a case.....or a spinner and a BIG case. Last forever, I have an 18 year old Barracuda 320 I still use

I have a 1GB USB stick that is well over 10 years old, overwritten many times, and in regular use for system rescue.
But then again, I also have spinning hard drives that are that old. Sometimes sitting in cupboards for years.
Electronics aren't all that fragile.

Attached Thumbnails

 

A couple of things:

1) As mentioned above an HDD is much better in the long run. SSDs have come a long way so don’t rule them out.

2) Pen drives up to 128GB is what I’m using regularly on a day to day without much issue. Bigger drives usually take longer to load on older machines (windows)

3) I use pen drives for work almost daily. I actually washed it, dried it unknowingly and was hesitant to use it possibly destroying my pc. Few weeks later I couldn’t find the other drives so had to use the one that went through the laundry. It works flawlessly no issues and it’s currently my go to drive for work.

4) Not all electronics are made equally. U can buy any one of them HDD, SSD, or flash and experience issues right out the box or they can be in the family for years.

I only buy from reputable sources. Never had an issue but people that buy from some online places get junk.

I'd never use a flash drive for backups. A usb 3 mechanical is much better and may cost less.

Limit has only to do with maybe the 32/64 bit of your OS.

I had only one usb flash that just didn't like ext4. Suspected controller timing. Never had an issue with external usb mechanical. Why pay more for a ssd? It's a backup.

Otherwise buy an internal enterprise level drive and use it for backups.

additionally I would buy and use two devices. If one of them dies you can replace it without any loss....

1 members found this post helpful.

I have an inexpensive 16GB USB2 flash drive from a well-known manufacturer.

The write speed is glacial - 6MB/s. I use it only for OS installation.
Ed

The chips on those little devices are different, even on the same brand, same pack.

I bought a 3 pack of 32 GB little sticks on sale, they are Lexar. They have lasted fine for 4 or 5 years now. 2 of the sticks will write at about 11 or so MBps. The third one out of the same pack will only write at about 3MBps.

I have erased each and filled them back up once every 3 weeks. They rotate. And then they get played on a bluray player all week. That's 16 or so times a year for 5 years. They are fine for that. But everything that is put on the USB stick is also backed up on spinning rust. Some of it is also on optical media.

I've had optical media last for 20 years now. I don't know which I trust more, good optical media or a hard drive. Hard drive is far more convenient, but hard drives go bad. Optical media will go bad eventually.

I guess one needs to RAID anything that is real important, and then change out the drives every 6-7 years.

I like the good ol days where a book would last for 200 years, and photos were kept in an album book, they would last for 200 years also.

I wonder at your good opinion of optical media.

I lose my best kept disks at 5 years or slightly over, and dvd drives not long after. Dust buildup is a major issue. Optical are anything but childproof, and a sure sign of their "Success" or lack thereof is that they have been dispensed with in nearly all new laptops. Written sparingly a usb drive outlasts them.

Maybe you change dvds under ideal laboratory conditions, I don't know. What you imply is that your optical drives and dvds last 20 years which I find very hard to imagine. DVDRs? DVDRWs?