Has a USB memory stick ever failed on you?

I had a 2GB one back when 2GB was huge, it's symptoms were odd: You could write to it, and the OS would appear to write fine, but all that would show were files called "00000000", which contained only huge amount of "0" characters. If you looked at the drive size specifically in Windows, it reported 16TB (yes terra, not a typo :P) but Linux still reported 2GB.

Aside from that, I have a story similar to joe_bleau's (and probably many other people). The company I work for buys them in bulk, branded with our company logos and containing promo material. They fail fairly regularly - good enough to get the material to clients, but not good for use after that! Terrible - but it's worth bearing in mind that they're the cheapest the marketing guys could find.

On the positive side I have a Kingston DataTraveler that I think I've had for 4 years, maybe 3. It is used all day, every day and hasn't missed a beat. I've recommended them to family and never heard of any problems.

The important thing to take from this is that if you buy quality, failures are rare - but try to never have only one copy of important data!

I accidentally put a USB stick in the laundry once – it worked perfectly well, despite being in hot soapy water for an hour.

I've been working on a full-time project to develop content for Linux LiveUSB keys.

We've seen dramatic differences between keys. The same image written to 2 different keys can produce hugely different results. My 16GB Sandisk key from Best Buy works without any problems. The cheap no-name key we acquired from a supplier has intermittent failures.

The problem appears to be with the controller in the key and not the flash memory. We were originally concerned that the wear-leveling was causing "fixed files" to migrate data between pages when writing new files to other areas of the filesystem.

So, we used the badblocks utility to write patterns to the key to exercise the flash memory and give the controller a chance to detect any bad pages. Then after we wrote the LiveUSB image we verified it against the original, and it passed.

However, after running badblocks, when doing lots of random, continuous writes we frequently see invalid data returning from the key. We assume that this is a race condition in the USB-to-flash-memory controller in the key.

The end result is that you get what you pay for. You may get away with using a cheap key, but you shouldn't trust it for all situations. A more expensive key will likely have better tested hardware that is less likely to fail when you need it most.