Pen drive

[ricki]

It might have been static or just made poorly.

I even caught one student with a powerfull magnet placing it on the side of the computers to try and break things

Richard

[DMcCoy]

The problem is that they will just wear out with sufficient use. I don't believe that windows (unless 7 does) uses any sort of wear levelling for such devices.

We get a number of dead ones each year with no physical damage, they have just stopped working.

Edit: It seems some flash drives will do wear levelling, this is quite interesting from Corsair:

https://compatible.corsairmemory.com...r_leveling.pdf