Ant wrote

Either I'm having bad luck

Or are mistreating them in some way.

or USB flash drives suck even with various sizes
(e.g., 512 MB to 32 GB), well known brand names
(e.g., SanDisk), and cheap/free ones (SP [a few years]
and Patriot [had it since 10/3/2015]). They don't
seems like they don't last longer than a year.
I keep them in my drawers, wallets, etc.

I use them a lot, for the torrented movies the neighbours
kids get me to get for them that they pay on their PS3/4
and a set top box and have only ever had the one failure
with one unbranded one what appears to have failed at
the work place of the kids, a nursing home.

Some just stopped working and not detected at all by any
computers (desktops and (laptop/notebook)s and OSes
(Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows).

That is the result I got with the only one that has failed.
I haven't even bothered to open it up to check how its
failed, whether it is a simple mechanical failure, dry
joint/cracked trace etc or what.

Some are detected but no disk volumes seen and
can't even partition and format. Some seen and
connected, but can't been fully formatted.

What's up?

Either bad luck or the way you are treating them static wise.

The kids don’t do anything special with them static wise
and the houses are all carpeted, 3 different houses. And
at least one of them has full aircon used in the winter for
heating which can be a static problem. One other has gas
heating and I forget what the third one has heating wise.
I've only been in there in other than the winter, moving
some heavy furniture in there.

I think I need to go buy new ones soon. What are GOOD
reliable brands 32+ GB that can handle hot temperatures

I can't say given that I have had few failures and
don’t even know the brand of the one that did fail
given that its unbranded and marked with the
nursing home label.

(feeling them is hot due to heavy usages like copying
huge files, installing and running OSes, etc. for hours),

I don’t do that with these, just put movies on
them tho its clear that the kids do use them
for data like photos and assignments etc.

lots of physically moving around, etc.?

These get plenty of that, usually in cars but not always.

Is Lexar brand any good as shown in
http://www.salescircular.com/ca/computer/usbstp.shtml web page
from the local So(uthern) CA(lifornia) stores (Fry's Electronics, Best
Buy, Costco, Walmart, Target, Office Depot, Staples, etc.).

Yes, some of the ones I use are Lexars.

Of course they must be returnable if the drives die
quickly again within return times. :P

Thank you in advance.

Still smirking.