Gone Like A... Flash Drive?
Fred, In http://langa.com/newsletters/2006/2006-03-30.htm#4 , you said and I quote, "Nothing's interactively written to the flash drive. This makes things much faster, and also increases the life of the flash device by not needlessly consuming the device's finite number of write cycles."
One of the reasons I bought a USB flash drive is that, without any moving parts, I figured it would last for many years. Although you were writing about something else altogether, you're telling me to not get my hopes up. QUESTION: What is, then, a reasonable expectation for the life of a USB flash drive? How many read-write cycles should I hope for? Thanks! ---Bruce Fraser
Alas, flash drives are quite finite, although their life depends very much on how heavily they're used. We discussed some lifetime estimates in "Life Expectancy Of Flash Drives?" http://langa.com/newsletters/2005/2005-12-08.htm#4
Besides electrical life, there also can be issues with the plug itself; it's a natural stress point, and any repeated flexing of the joint between the mechanical plug and its electrical connections can lead to failure of the connections. Many people who routinely use flash drives use a flexible USB extension cable that allows for easier, better alignments of the plugs and sockets; and/or to let the (relatively) disposable cable take the brunt of the mechanical abuse, rather than the flash device itself.
And here's something curious: Microsoft is headed in exactly the opposite direction. Vista will be able to use a flash drive as temporary RAM. The idea, which probably seemed good at the time, was that you could plug a flash drive to any Vista PC, and add any unused memory in the flash device to the RAM pool available to the PC: Need more RAM to handle a giant spreadsheet or presentation? No problem: Stick a flash drive in a socket, and tell Vista to use it as RAM.
But in other than emergency use, this seems like maybe not such a great idea to me: RAM can get written to *a lot*, and using a flash drive as vanilla RAM seems like a great way to use up its finite number of write cycles in a hurry. And anyway, Flash RAM is much, much slower than standard RAM.
But hey: Microsoft didn't ask for my opinion. <g>
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