Plenty of them. One startup I worked at had hundreds of cluster machines booting from USB drives. I'd say one or two failed every month. They were Kingston bran

Plenty of them. One startup I worked at had hundreds of cluster machines booting from USB drives. I'd say one or two failed every month. They were Kingston brand, too. But they got a lot of use (read and write) and there were literally hundreds of them going at a time. It goes without saying: back up your data. Never trust your data to be stored in just one location. Mode of failure varied, but it usually manifested itself in the form of a corrupt filesystem. A few wouldn't even show up as a device when plugged in.