u/Jazzlike_Tip_63

I recently found an old USB flash drive from around 2016 with a bunch of photos and random backups on it. I honestly forgot this thing even existed.

I plugged it in fully expecting it to be dead already, but surprisingly it still works fine. That got me wondering: how long do USB flash drives actually last?

Some people say USB drives can randomly fail after just a few years, while others claim flash memory slowly loses data if the drive sits unplugged for too long. And then there's the whole "cheap drives vs branded drives" debate too.

At the same time, I know some people still have 10+ year old USB sticks working perfectly.

So now I'm curious:

• What's the oldest flash drive you still use?
• Have you ever had one suddenly die?
• Do you trust USB drives for actual long-term storage, or just temporary transfers?
• Have you ever lost important files from one?

I feel like USB drives are one of those things everyone trusts… until one suddenly dies.

I'm not very tech-savvy, so sorry if this is a basic question.

My PC is still running on an old SATA HDD and it's starting to feel really slow lately: long boot times and games taking forever to load.

I'm thinking about cloning everything over to a SATA SSD, but I'm not sure how big the real-world difference actually is.

For those who've done this before, did it feel like a major upgrade? Was the difference noticeable in gaming too, or mostly just Windows being faster?

Also, are there any cloning tools you'd recommend (or ones to avoid)? And is there anything I should watch out for during the cloning process?

Part of me is also wondering if I should just skip SATA SSD entirely and go straight to NVMe instead… not sure if it's worth the extra cost. TIA!