USB Key Dodgy

Why is it USB keys seem to be an unreliable piece of equipment?  We have four in the house at the moment, one of which has decided to kark it.  In fact it probably never was a goer.

This is the third one I've had that's rubbish.  It's uncanny that they all have a common characteristic in that they were all bought for someone else!

The first one that died was bought for my wife for Christmas a long time ago.  She had bought me one for my birthday I think, from Dick Smith and it is still going strong, however time has crept up on it and it's only 1 gigabyte...  However I mainly use it to keep a backup of the drama group website, among general file transfers.  The one I bought her was a 2 gig unit, obtained from Big W.  Alas, it never worked from the start, however Big W were quite okay when I brought it back for an exchange.  At the time, these things were quite expensive.  The replacement is still going strong and copping a lot of use.  It travels with my wife to and from work every day.

The second one to die was one bought from Joyce Mayne for my Dad.  It was 1 gigabyte and I think it was $4.95 (oh how they have come down in price).  Dad was doing a course in basic emailing so we could send him stuff on an overseas trip rudely aborted by my oesophageal rupture. It was working fine and had been used to get a few test pictures emailed to his Yahoo address.  Then we went and plugged it into his $39 DVD player and it simply ceased functioning.  We're convinced the DVD player was the culprit, however the USB key itself WAS only $4.95 so we're really not sure.  This one was thrown out after I fished out the receipt and original packaging and had it sitting on the kitchen bench for about 6 months.  I think the cost of the petrol to get me over to Joyce Mayne would have exceeded the benefit from an exchange.

The third one was one bought from (hmmmmmm) Joyce Mayne as one of nine raffle prizes for the last play at Wyong Drama Group.  It was won by my father-in-law's brother who gave it to my father-in-law who then used it to transfer genealogy data down here so Sharon could do some more work on it.  It worked fine for that, and fine in her laptop.  It was then used downstairs here on our desktop and it wouldn't have a bar of it.  Sharon then took it to work the next day and again, not recognised by any work machine.

It still works in the laptop, however, so I went and formatted it, and discovered it only works on the laptop if plugged into the USB ports on the left hand side: not the ones on the right!  Also I gave it a better test by copying a 1.5 gigabyte file to it (it's a 2 Gig stick) and it failed, even plugged into the left hand side USB ports.

I'm of a definite mind to take this one back to Joyce Mayne.  I can put up with one dieing (and it may have been killed rather than actually dieing of its own volition) but a second one is inexcusable.