At the first hint of trouble, it may actually have been premature, I swapped the USB drive on my probe with a brandname replacement. Note that there is a lot of poor quality stuff, especially in "giveaway" drives, and the fact that the disc is encrypted of course does not help heuristics in the USB drive controller to lengthen the drive life.
The replacement was painless: power down, insert blank disk, powerup, did the dishes, when I was done the probe was done initializing and everything was working fine. I've added "replaced-broken-sandisk-usb-stick" to the probe. Perhaps this is a useful heuristic to monitor how prevalent the problem really is. Geert Jan
