It could be anything from specific driver for the flash controller in the stick to, a stick that is not operating within the normal parameters of normal USB sticks ( outside of tolerance ), to a damaged stick.
The good thing is that these days unless you have a large flash drive, they are dirt cheap to replace. I have a pile of these in a ziplock bag with data back ups on them etc as well as bootable tools and system recovery sticks marked with silver sharpie marker in case I need to reinstall the OS clean to my netbook for example that has no optical drive and had a system recovery software built into it to make a system recovery flash stick set of 2 sticks, 1 with the OS, and 1 with applications that are optional install.
Good to see you got it working.
I have only had 1 stick go bad on me in the 8 years or so that i have been using them. The problems I had with the one that died on me was that windows would complain when it connected that it wanted to correct for problems and I would allow for it to correct these, and when reading data off of it it seemed to work ok, but when writing data to it it was super slow to the point that I thought it had stopped transferring to the stick, but there was a slow trickle of writing to this device. The good thing is that since it was able to read fine, but had write issues, i copied all the contents to my C: drive and then copied the contents to a new larger stick. The stick that failed was a 1GB stick that I got really cheap as part of a Live linux distro on a USB stick for like $5 back when 1GB sticks were like $8 new. I figured I'd save myself $3 and buy this to try out and likely format to use as a normal stick. The USB stick was a very cheap brand and it didnt last more than about a year of constant use daily. I tried all sorts of online free tools to try to recondition the flash, but it had to have been damaged someway and maybe by design when it detects a flaw in its flash memory, the memory controller slows the transfer rate to point out that the stick is not to be trusted anymore. Just an assumption as for I am not sure if the internal flash controllers are smart enough or designed well enough to perform error checking and then to throttle the speed if there are problems like this when writing to the stick only whereas the reading from the stick was as fast as its always been.
