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What is the best quality usb flash drive?

I need a flash drive anywhere from 8-32gigs. However, I need one that is EXTREMELY reliable. I have now had two usb flash drives fail on me in the past few months. Price is not an issue; I just need something that will not fail. Speed is not a huge concern although I don’t want a super slow drive. Reliability is by far the most important concern. Any Recommendations?

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Answer #1

There are different kinds of flash memory. Single Layer Cell (SLC), Multi Layer Cell (MLC) and Three Layer Cell (TLC). The highest performance, most durable, and most dependable flash is SLC. SLC encodes a single bit per cell while MLC and TLC are cheaper and have higher capacity because they store multiple bits per cell. SLC drives are small (think they are all 8GB or smaller) and expensive compared to the same capacity MLC drives. The 4GB and 8GB OCZ Rally 2 Turbo are listed as SLC drives. These seem to be out of production and most merchants are out of them. I’m not aware of any other SLC thumb drives. If you can not find an SLC drive than better brands of MLC drives have superior wear leveling algorithms and should last longer than bargain basement drives. SanDisk, Corsair, Crucial, OCZ, Kingston, Lexar all make good products.

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