Another important consideration is the structural integrity of the flash drive itself. I recently got a hard lesson about this as I discovered, after getting settled into my new residence in Pennsylvania, that my USB flash drive didn’t work any more. After taking it apart (and seeing that there’s no way in hell I could put it back together), I found a (power, I believe) wire broken off its connection to the mainboard.

So, I said goodbye to that flash drive. Fortunately, all of the data was a backup to data I store on my desktop and my laptop (and a backup DVD-R that’s in a box somewhere…), so I didn’t lose any data of any sort. I only lost my ability to pop that data into any ol’ computer I want and use my stuff.

Considering this recent disappointment, I have been looking into more robust flash drives as a replacement. I learned earlier on this board about the Corsair Flash Survivor/Survivor GT, which not only appears strong enough to survive every day carry, it seems just about bomb proof. There are other drive models available from Corsair, Sandisk, Lexar, etc., but this one seems to take the cake as it can withstand harsh outdoor environments and has absolutely no internal moving parts that could break.