Life Expectancy of Flash Memory Drives

From: Kenneth Lantrip (nunya_at_bidny.ok)
Date: 06/30/04 

Date: Wed, 30 Jun 2004 09:45:46 -0400

Yesterday, my PNY Atache flash memory stick drive started to fail on me.
It can read all files just fine. So I managed to tar all the files into
a backup.

I can reformat it in Win2000 or Knoppix just fine. But when putting
files (of any kind) onto it will lock up the computer (W2k or Knoppix)
every time after about a minute or so of writing to the device. It does
this on two different computers that I've tried.

Conclusion: The drive is bad.

My query is: Does anyone know about how long one should expect one of
these type drives to last under daily use as a Knoppix persistant home
directory? Anyone know of any utilities to lock out a bad memory
cell/sector?

I thought since these things don't have moving parts (other than moving
from place to place) they should last quite a while and be very reliable
from data loss. Guess I was wrong.

Anyone else run into problems with flash memory?

Thanks.

Kenneth Lantrip

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