USBThumbdrive quality/reliability

I have a number of thumb drives that came from Microcenter. I’ve acquired them over several years. They were all free. I would save some data, music, ebooks on them and put them in a desk drawer. I recently tried to look into one, after it has been sitting there for maybe a year, and it was very “ balky”, and took forever to just display its content. I did try and play one or two songs. It went fine at first but then eventually froze up. This is the second one that behaved this way. They just have MicroCenter printed on them and are 32 g capacity. They have since started to give away 128g ones, just to encourage foot traffic in their store. As I said, they were free, so I really can’t complain, but I would rather buy ones that will last or stay readable. Has anyone else had this problem? Is any brand more reliable than another?