Can a USB thumbdrive "wear out"?

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If these new SSD drives use flash memory, will they also become corrupted quickly from the constant writes?

I keep thinking about jumping to SSD as the prices drop and the sizes jump, and the biggest attraction to me is not the blazing speed (that is nice too), but the peace-of-mind from not having to worry about the old fashioned platter-spinning drives physically crashing.

However, after reading all these comments, it sounds like I'll be lucky if an SSD drive can last a year or two as the main drive on my computer before all the little bits start blowing like fuses.

Do these SSD drives use the same type of flash memory and what kind of life expectancy can I expect. (OZC's latest SSD drive says 1.5 million hours mean time before failure or MTBF, but now I am wondering what that spec measures - is that all time spent reading data and none spent writing).

If the little bits are all being flashed into oblivion will I even get a fraction of that 1.5 million hours? Should I hold off with SSD drives and embrace my good old platter-spinning drives for data integrity and longevity for a while longer?

Extremely interesting subject. I heard someone say the Eee computer from Asus (and other me-too products) did not have a hard disk, only flash memory. I just browsed through the Asus website, but did not find a confirmation. True, not true?

the flash can not be read from any computer. They do not recognize a new storage device (the red led on the flash is not on) . is the flash drive gone for good or can it be saved?

I'd rather see some information from the manufacturers on this. Wear-leveling is supposed to be built into the memory controller, so it automatically takes care of wear, and only writes to parts that haven't been written to too many times. One would presume that it would also double-check everything it's written to make sure it can be read correctly, and mark it as a bad sector if it doesn't read back what it wrote.

Yeah, they wear out, but I'm skeptical that you would actually lose any data because of it. In a well-designed product, the available capacity on the drive would just decrease over time.

"Diskeeper Corporation" has a reference in it's settings for Diskeeper 2009 that says it has technology to help flash units from becoming error prone and suggests that longevity can be attained by using their defragmenting technology.

If it "flashes" the drive as you say, defragmenting would reduce longevity, no?

I'm not questioning your guruness, O Mighty Leo, but this seems to be a contradiction. I don't know enough about it, just what I read.

My 2 cents CDN.

What about thumb drives used in Vistas's "Ready Boost" facility or E-Boostr's program that alleges to do much the same thing in XP?
http://www.eboostr.com/
I tried E-Boostr in XP and I can't say as I noticed a great deal of difference in the perkiness factor, despite using high speed drives! How much reading/writing goes on using these facilities and what sort of life will the drives have? (Tedious, I would imagine!). I did read one report that MS expects a thumb drive using Ready Boost to outlast the PC's life, which seems a tad optimistic to me.

I use USB drives pretty regularly with some pen drive apps, especially T-bird and Firefox and a few recovery tools I use to fix peoples computers like Bart-PE, Ubuntu and file recovery stuff. I haven't had any problems but I keep a folder on my hard drive for each USB drive and back up regularly. No hardware is immune to failure. My only loss would be the $10 I invested in my stick.

Here's an old classic:

Yesterday-The Backup Song
Yesterday,
All those backups seemed a waste of pay.
Now my database has gone away.
Oh I believe in yesterday.

Suddenly,
There’s not half the files there used to be,
And there’s a milestone hanging over me
The system crashed so suddenly.

I pushed something wrong
What it was I could not say.
Now all my data’s gone
and I long for yesterday-ay-ay-ay.

Yesterday,
The need for back-ups seemed so far away.
I knew my data was all here to stay,
Now I believe in yesterday

I've only had my 8gb kingston thumb drive for a short while and havent used it for much, the occasional word document or so. But as if overnight, I don't know what happened, but now my thumb drive has been reduced to the capacity of 4mb! and also says that it needs to be formatted. I used some partition making program provided by kingston so i don;t know if that screwed up the thing or maybe its somehow this 'wearing out' phenomenon. I've formatted it but it still remains on 4mb capacity! What could have happened?? I don't recall doing any thumb drive no-nos recently...

They have error protection and will attempt to block out bad blocks and work around the problem.

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