Raspberry Pi 4 unstable when run from USB stick

[Benny Siegert <bsiegert%gmail.com@localhost>]

Hi!

My Raspberry Pi 4 has a broken SD card, so I installed the latest -current 
snapshot (9.99.106) onto a USB stick, only using the UEFI loader on the SD 
card. This works generally fine but after a few hours of load on the 
system (compiling stuff, for example), USB stick eventually becomes 
unresponsive. Any processes using it either hang or get an I/O error. The 
error messages on console 1 are an endless stream of

umass0: BBB reset failed, TIMEOUT
umass0: BBB bulk-in clear stall failed, TIMEOUT
umass0: BBB bulk-out clear stall failed, TIMEOUT

A few questions, if I may:

 - Is this a problem with the stick, or with the Pi?
 - Any ideas so that this no longer occurs?
 - Do other folks have the same issue with USB-attached storage?


Lastly, is there a better way in general to have storage on an RPi? SD 
cards are not reliable in the long (or even medium) term. USB sticks are 
unreliable. Is spinning rust the answer? Or some sort of special storage 
attachment hat?

--
Benny