On Sat, 29 May 2010 07:59:31 -0400, David Relson wrote:

> Indeed flash drives _do_ have a lifetime.  My recollection is that it's
> in the thousands of writes if not the hundreds of thousands of writes.
> Assuming a life of 1,000 writes and you backup once daily, that's 3
> years of backups.  10,000 writes would be 30 years.  Of course if you
> backup every hour, 10,000 writes is a year (or so).

You're assuming that each backup only writes once, which is far from
true. If you mount a drive with the sync option, the FAT is updated for
every block you write, so even a single file can cause thousands of
writes to the same location.


-- 
Neil Bothwick

Electrocution, n.:
Burning at the stake with all the modern improvements.