brand of flash matters.

before the raspi came along and popularized arm computing, there was a very lively scene around arm hacking out of existing devices. sheevaplug started the trend and people found that things like the seagate dockstar (a nas based hard drive dock) could be easily modified to boot a linux distro from usb and run as a low power headless server.

we kept a list of results from our experiences of what issues we had when trying to use new/different thumbdrives in the dockstar.

various issues with some brands included being unable to cold boot (boot from a power off state) or warm boot (boot when rebooting the system from a power on state). the brands that gave us issues were fairly consistent in this regards. we had the best luck with sandisk based thumbdrives.

i imagine the situation and cause is probably similar, if not identical, in this case.

>sheevaplug started the trend

Not to be pedantic, but before the Sheevaplug, there was the Linksys NSLU2, which came out in 2004:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSLU2

http://www.nslu2-linux.org/wiki/FAQ/FirmwareMatrix

Pedantry noted. It's probably better describing the SheevaPlug as the device that fostered the trend towards plug computing rather than the one that encouraged device hacking as my statement would imply. I mistakenly omitted the key detail that the Dockstar was a custom piece of hardware that was based on the SheevaPlug... Same SOC and features.

Those were the days! I was the first to hack in to get root on that little box but others took it much further than me!

http://batbox.org/nslu2-linux.html

I still have a couple around, but rarely turn them on.

True, USB IO deadlocks and power usage causing drops/freeze made me stop using it. It was a surprise how many things can go wrong when you're out of the comfort of an industrial brand built PC board.

That's where I see the issues crop up. "Uncontrolled shutdowns" seem to be a killer of SD cards for me even when using R/O only filesystems. Wouldn't this be enough of a factor to point the issue towards software and not hardware though?

Honestly I don't know. The rpi is a weird SoC though, and many things are handled in the GPU by a blob, even if it's software it's outside our control.