Running system from USB stick. A question about wear and tear

[crispy]

Hey, my HDD in my Eee 1000H pc broke some time ago, but I just installed ubuntu 10.04 on ext4 4 on a Kingston DataTraveler 16gb. It works like a charm, a little slower but the slow Eee make it feel like its not a bottleneck anyways

So, how long will it take before all the reading/writing to the flash memory starts to create some dead sectors?

Actually its very nifty with this usb disk as I can just plug it into whatever and start using my own system

[L33F3R]

iv been using my 4gb kingston for. fuck... something like 5 years. No isues with it yet. I was told long ago that the rule of thumb is to replace it every year to avoid problems. Obviosly it depends on how much you use it.

[Svartalf]

iv been using my 4gb kingston for. fuck... something like 5 years. No isues with it yet. I was told long ago that the rule of thumb is to replace it every year to avoid problems. Obviosly it depends on how much you use it.

The "rule of thumb" is more for the cheap stuff and the older stuff, mainly because it doesn't have good wear-leveling on it. I expect 3-5 years out of the non SSD devices in service as a SSD, and that's more me wanting to keep mission critical stuff going in top form rather than putting it off to the last moment and maybe having some unplanned down time.