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

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!