I figure that I can safely say now that the problems are due to the device and/or the rt2x00 driver. I have been using Ethernet only the last 48 hours, copied many many Gigabytes of data, and haven't got a single problem. Hence, currently I would discourage the usage of rt2800 based devices, and I will try to find another dongle, maybe one with the Realtek chip, since that seems to be the most widely used.

EDIT: I bought a TPL-WN725N with a RTL8188CUS chip. It works out of the box, currently with 0.5 GB of traffic, and still running. It also seems somewhat faster than the Ralink based dongle. I get 1.9MByte/sec, whereas before I had 1.3MByte/sec. Let's see if it will let the Pi run longer and not freeze up.

I figure that I can safely say now that the problems are due to the device and/or the rt2x00 driver. I have been using Ethernet only the last 48 hours, copied many many Gigabytes of data, and haven't got a single problem. Hence, currently I would discourage the usage of rt2800 based devices, and I will try to find another dongle, maybe one with the Realtek chip, since that seems to be the most widely used.

EDIT: I bought a TPL-WN725N with a RTL8188CUS chip. It works out of the box, currently with 0.5 GB of traffic, and still running. It also seems somewhat faster than the Ralink based dongle. I get 1.9MByte/sec, whereas before I had 1.3MByte/sec. Let's see if it will let the Pi run longer and not freeze up.

EDIT: >5 GB and still going strong. Looks very promising. Will keep it running to see if it fails.

I figure that I can safely say now that the problems are due to the device and/or the rt2x00 driver. I have been using Ethernet only the last 48 hours, copied many many Gigabytes of data, and haven't got a single problem. Hence, currently I would discourage the usage of rt2800 based devices, and I will try to find another dongle, maybe one with the Realtek chip, since that seems to be the most widely used.

I figure that I can safely say now that the problems are due to the device and/or the rt2x00 driver. I have been using Ethernet only the last 48 hours, copied many many Gigabytes of data, and haven't got a single problem. Hence, currently I would discourage the usage of rt2800 based devices, and I will try to find another dongle, maybe one with the Realtek chip, since that seems to be the most widely used.

EDIT: I bought a TPL-WN725N with a RTL8188CUS chip. It works out of the box, currently with 0.5 GB of traffic, and still running. It also seems somewhat faster than the Ralink based dongle. I get 1.9MByte/sec, whereas before I had 1.3MByte/sec. Let's see if it will let the Pi run longer and not freeze up.