I too have had problems with reliability, though more so when the device has already booted. e.g. numerous times I've had the device completely hang during file access.
When problems such as this crop up it really puts a dampener on the experience.
When problems such as this crop up it really puts a dampener on the experience.
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.
Not to be pedantic, but before the Sheevaplug, there was the Linksys NSLU2, which came out in 2004:
http://batbox.org/nslu2-linux.html
I still have a couple around, but rarely turn them on.