USB Key Compatibility?

[Christopher Browne]

I've got a USB key I'm trying to troubleshoot for a friend.  It's a
4GB unit; seems pretty generic.

The desire is to have it "play" with both Windows and Mac systems.  I
haven't got Windows handy; what I'm finding is that on anything
Unix-like (Linux, FreeBSD, MacOS), data seems to spontaneously corrupt
upon unmounting.

Does this seem consistent with, say, cruddy design?  I know there are
variations between USB keys vis-a-vis whether they'll boot
successfully; is this corruption likely a similar sort of thing?

I'd hate to report back "buy less crappy hardware," but I'd rather
that than spend a lot of time debugging something that won't work...

-- 
http://linuxfinances.info/info/linuxdistributions.html
"...  memory leaks  are  quite acceptable  in  many applications  ..."
(Bjarne Stroustrup, The Design and Evolution of C++, page 220)
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