Rewrite 20 times? They should be good for hundreds if not thousands.
These do look sturdier than some, but I don't like sliders so I pop drives open, put epoxy in to strengthen them and fix them in the extended position. I suspect that a lot of failures people see are not from exhausting writes but rather that the PCB to USB solder connection fails so I carefully put a bead of epoxy there, taking care not to let it seep into the USB connector shell. I know it seems excessive but this only takes a couple minutes to do, and I've never had a flash drive fail that I've done this to.
Something else related, back when I got a Teamgroup C145 with a slider, I noticed that it has an access indicator LED but it is barely visible through the opaque slider plastic. Having it popped open, i observed the LED is on the trailing edge of the PCB, and all space behind it when extended is empty, now wasted space that just makes it that much easier to bump it while pulled into a port. I sawed off the back of the casing, plugged the end with clear epoxy, and now the LED is far more visible out the rear of the drive (lights up the entire epoxy filled end if the epoxy bridges to be on the LED) in addition to being very durable. It does not hurt anything to have epoxy covering anything and everything as long as the standard non-conductive type. I would not use a metal filled one like JBWeld as it may be slightly capacitive.
That's the nice thing about cheap products, you can mess around with them.
However if looking for a cheap slow drive, that doesn't retract, and has a unique (for plastic encased at least) single piece casing rather than two shell halves snapped together, the Teamgroup C175 is at a similar price point on Amazon.
... about writing on them, I wish some flash drives came with a matte white panel on the back similar to that found on credit cards for your signature.
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