Has anyone here had problems with flash drives? I haven't. The only read errors I recall are the ones from when I used USB flash devices for the root and /var/cache/squid filesystems.
The usb flash disk I carry around with me with a bunch of tools on it is pretty much unwritable. Any file I write to it now may or may not be readable. Existing files are fine though. This particular flash disk is about 5 years old and has spent a day in a cup of water and been through the wash (pesky kids!). I'll replace it when I need to update it. One service we provide for customers is doing restore tests - a full restore of their servers (physical or virtual) onto virtual hardware in our office to 'prove' the backups. On one occasion I burned a whole day because I'd copied an ISO of the boot CD (it was a Windows server using Backup Exec Intelligent Disaster Recovery) onto a usb flash disk and it had a single flipped bit which meant the restore would seem to fail with a network error very soon after starting. It was only on a whim that I did an sum of the original iso and my copy and found that they were different. This one was a pretty much brand new usb flash disk. I didn't do any testing on it after so I don't know if the flipped bit was just a freak occurrence or an actual fault with a flash cell. Maybe I've just been unlucky? James