Depends on the stick, I have a couple of ~15 year old sticks that still work 100% reliably whenever I need a 4GB installation media, compared to HDDs that are l

Depends on the stick, I have a couple of ~15 year old sticks that still work 100% reliably whenever I need a 4GB installation media, compared to HDDs that are less than 2 years old and riddled with remapped sectors :/ I think I've only ever thrown away 1 USB stick due to failure, microSD is my nemesis when it comes to putting 'reliable' and 'flash' in the same sentence, everything else seems to last just fine as long as it's not used constantly.