Mach Xtreme Technology ES Ultra SLC - USB Stick - USB 3.0-16 GB - Grey

I was looking for a USB flash drive specifically for use as an OS boot disk for a server running FreeBSD. It wouldn't be frequently written to, but reliability/longevity was a requirement, and performance a secondary consideration. As such I was exclusively looking at single-level cell flash disks (believing them to fit these needs*), and in October 2015 I purchased this one. After just over two and a half years it failed under normal near-idle workload, and none of its data could be recovered so I had to rebuild the server.Given its main selling point of being SLC and the higher price that comes with that, I would not recommend this over any other run-of-the-mill flash drive. No matter how fancy or expensive, all USB sticks will eventually die, and even today the old practice of expecting failure and maintaining a good backup routine remains the gold standard.*In 2016, researchers from Google and the University of Toronto authored a "large-scale field study covering many millions of drive days, ten different drive models, different flash technologies (MLC, eMLC, SLC) over 6 years of production use in Google's data centers", and found "no evidence that higher-end SLC drives are more reliable than MLC drives within typical drive lifetimes". I can't link to it here, but it's referenced in Wikipedia's "Multi-level cell" article.

Real USB 3.0 speeds. Best pendrive i've had so far. +++