I’m thinking about getting one for several purposes, primarily for portable software, some certificates and keys, and a few backups. Since it won’t be powered off for more than a few days or weeks and won’t experience heavy writing (although I plan to use Veracrypt and that may cause some stress)
How long can I expect it to last? Obviously there will be backups, but I also don’t want to lose anything on it as much as possible.
As someone who works in IT since 2005 I haven’t seen many die. Then again we barely use them so maybe in my life I’ve handled about 10-15 and seen 2 die. One in spectacular fashion when our department gave us all one since they thought it was a tool that was needed. Every single one of them ended up dying within the year. Just goes to show quality of the product can matter significantly sometimes. Outside that, they are pretty reliable, but I also would trust them the least out of the other options available for storage.