Flash Drive Mounting Problems

Bought my MacBook Pro in Nov 2010.

I have been using three different flash drives (2 x transcend - 1x4GB, 1x16GB; 1xVerbatim) quite happily until about a week ago. Now when I plug any of the drives into the USB port closest to me, the drive either doesn't display or it does display briefly followed by a "This drive was not ejected properly" message and then it disappears.

If I plug any of the drives into the USB port furthest from me, they work fine. ***?

I also have an externally powered USB hub that has a 1 terabyte seagate external drive plugged into it. That seems to work no matter which USB port I plug it into.

Finally I've noticed that the memory card from my camera has gradually stopped working with the card slot in the macbook. it's deteriorated slowly, for a while I could slide it in and out and eventually it would connect; now it doesn't work at all and I'm reduced to uploading photos via a USB cable.

Model Name: MacBook Pro

Model Identifier: MacBookPro6,2

Processor Name: Intel Core i7

Processor Speed: 2.66 GHz

Number Of Processors: 1

Total Number Of Cores: 2

L2 Cache (per core): 256 KB

L3 Cache: 4 MB

Memory: 4 GB

Processor Interconnect Speed: 4.8 GT/s

Boot ROM Version: MBP61.0057.B0C