Greetings fellow VMware gurus,
Recently had a production issue with a system using ESX3i. As it turns out my problem was the thumb drive. It just died while in production. I tried to reboot the system not knowing what the problem was and it would not boot. I don't know what errors came up it just all looked like klingon poetry to me. So that is where I came to the conclusion that I needed to wipe and reload the USB Drive. Luckily before standing up the system I created an image of the USB drive and stored it for future use. The system is an HP DL385 G5 with the USB header on the motherboard so I am not worried about someone perhaps bumping or unplugging the drive. When I tried to load my image on the drive it kept failing. I wiped the drive entirely and formatted it in Windows and it only had a capacity of about 936 MB and it is supposed to be a 2GB drive. In addition i could not copy data to the drive.
I grabbed a spare thumb drive and pushed the image I created back to the drive, plugged it in and everything was good. It just needed to be patched. It seems to me that this is the a single point of failure. So until HP , Dell or whoever comes up with a way to use RAID and mirror two thumb drives it would be a wise idea to have a few spare thumb drives around and ready for use.
What make and model would you suggest and why? Thank you all I will be looking forward to your response. 
-Jason a.k.a. RegNullify
