Monday, September 18, 2006

USB flash drives are failing

Hmm -- that won't be an ~infinite amount if I'm using a USB flash drive for Windows Vista swap space... 

USB flash memory drives are experiencing an increase in product failures as a result of quality-control problems, and the wildly popular replacements for floppy disks could be facing other problems related to fragmentation, according to industry experts.

Recent Gartner Inc. numbers indicate that 88.2 million USB flash drives were shipped in 2005, and 115.7 million will be shipped in 2006. While these portable nonvolatile storage units don't last forever, single-level cell NAND flash drives are commonly acknowledged to last for an average of 100,000 read-write cycles, which is an infinite amount for most users.

Source: USB flash drives are failing

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