Flash Memory Education, Please

[Y_K]

please, educate me on flash memory sticks/pens and cards. Any way to tell cheap tech from a decent one?
I am pretty comfortable with a rather large bunch of 4GB to 8GB sticks for creating various img and iso of esoteric OSes and rescue drives, but what about 256GB sticks? Is their retention still not suitable for archival purposes? What about differences in buffering, durability and write protection? I am not concerned with encryption.

TIA

 

[Y_K]

Sums it up

IOW, sticks are always a shortcut.

 

[spackard]

I guess you answered your own question. I've found a dashcam causes cheaper micro-SD cards to fail over several months. Also, the filesystem the cam lays down doesn't support a very large card.
I've been going a few years now with the latest 64GB one (Samsung 64GB Pro SDXC I bought in 2014).

Also, write speeds become very important with large sizes, where they aren't that painful to live with when using the smaller sizes.

 

[PandaBear]

It is mainly a quality thing.

There are some very low and very high quality memory and controller, the algorithm it runs, and the capacity you can use to cycle through the workload. The cheaper card has less because it assume you only write the entire capacity 50 times its entire life, instead of the whole capacity through 5 times a day every day for 5 years like an enterprise SSD. It is cheaper for a reason.

If you are not using it in a dash cam usually it is not a problem. If you are using it in a dash cam data retention may not be a problem if you cycle it through often. Just don't keep your family album in a parked car on the dash for 1 year and expect the photos to still be there, 1 month on the hot dash may be equivalent to 1 year in a cool room.