heh. My mom caught my flash drives in my pockets before they went through the washer.

I think I've accidentally put them through the wash once or twice..the 8gig also sat outside and rusted for a bit
I'm surprised it's lasted this long, actually

So a Sandisk Cruzer will work with usb8x?

If it's formatted in FAT[16?] it should. [!wikiti]usb8x[/!wikiti]

U3 kind of blows in general, first thing I did upon getting my second cruzer was uninstalling it (plus things like liberkey/portableapps.com do the same thing but about 10x better)
Once you get rid of it it works

I have an 8gb kingston micro sd usb adapter that's as slow as hell but is insanely small. But for other stuff I use a 16gb corsair which i find to be very reliable. According to reviews you can throw them off buildings and run them over with cars with no data loss.

edit: Corsair now sells 64 gb usb 3.0 drives 

Well, the PNY 8gbs are OK, my friend's went through the wash and the case came off, and he duct taped it back on.

Another reason they're bad: the case actually comes off. Both my Kingston and my Cruzer (and a 32 MB Kingston I had a few years ago) went through the wash and came out perfectly fine. (I should stop doing that.)

For my specific kingston choices, the DataTraveler 3.0 series is what I like to carry around ( http://www.kingston.com/flash/DTIG3.asp ) and is cheap, small, simple, and all around durable (had this one for quite a while, many many years; it's gone through hell and back and still in good shape).  If you have money and memory to blow, the DataTraveler Ultimate USB 3.0 series 2 ( http://www.kingston.com/flash/DTU30g2.asp ) is great (it's essentially my hard drive), though I've heard good about the R400/500's.

edit: Corsair now sells 64 gb usb 3.0 drives 

...And? Kingston has the DataTraveler 3.0 Ultimate 2 which is up to 64 GB and USB 3.0, and the R500 series has up to 128 GB and has comparable read/write speeds as USB 3.0 drives.

I've had no problems with me 2 gig PNY flash drive I bought either 3 or 4 years ago.  Maybe I'm just not very hard on it...

My friend recently bought an 8GB PNY drive, and it's already broken   Perhaps either you're lucky or he's unlucky.

There are esata+power ports, but they're rare. If there was an esata flash drive, it'd need either an AAA in it, or a USB cable coming off too, unless it just wanted to throw compatibility to the wind.

Kingstons aren't *that* expensive; I mean, they cost the extra buck, but your buck goes much further than it would being spent on a cheaper and less reputable brand.  It's like car insurance; sure, Geico can save you 15% or more in 15 minutes, but State Farm with that extra 15% a month or more will actually return your calls and help you when you need them.  Kingstons are great devices, and I still suggest them over pretty much every other brand.