Killer dockstar or bad pen drive batch?

[pentolino]

Hello,
I have tree dockstar (I once found them at 10€ each, didn't resist to buy two more than the one I already had); 2 of them are running archlinux arm 24/7 (one is mainly a torrentbox/nas, another is used as nas/backup, the third is waiting serial recovery, so it is currently offline).
In less than a year I had two dead pen drive (plain dead, they are not recognized by any pc), one for each dockstar; the first one lasted about 6 months and the second one died after less than two months. The two pen drives are same, make, model and probably batch as they were bought together.
I also had a bizarre hard drive failure after less than six months of use, which turned the drive into being completely unreliable.

Did I have bad luck or does the dockstar/archlinuxarm increase the risk of having an usb drive die?
Has anyone experienced such disasters?

Riccardo

Note: I do have /tmp and /var (and swap) on the regular hard drive (not flash) in order to limit the writes on flash memory; after experience, do hourly backups in order not to lose configurations etc.

[WarheadsSE]

General suggestion is if it is planned to be a long lived installation, put it on a spinning disk.

[pentolino]

Actually I could use two partitions (one ext2 for /boot and a big ext3/ext4 for everything else).
It takes a little time to do it, but I will try.

As a side note I also had a spinning disk failure

[WarheadsSE]

You might want to look into a Uninterruptable Power Supply. Sound like power issue could be causing failure.

[pentolino]

That's an interesting point!
You mean to avoid that the dockstar goes off without proper shutdown or just to avoid power spikes and such? In such events as power spikes I would expect something to fail far "before" the usb drive: it is filtered by both the power source and the motherboard which powers up the usb ports.
Also I'm not much into the topic (after all they all are home appliances, I don't use them for mission critical duties) so it would take quite time to configure the ups correctly.
I'm also concerned about the noise, which is almost zero for 2 dockstar and 2 2,5" 5400 rpm hds (barely noticeable if I put my ear within a few centimetres!)

[WarheadsSE]

I have a small one, and it runs my 4 plugs, 8 hdds for over an hour and a half.