Did you know that flash memory has a finite life?
A high capacity flash drive could be good for as little as 10,000 write cycles. That may sound like a lot if you're thinking about the entire drive, but there might be some data that you are continually rewriting.
For example, if you are editing directly on the flash, every time you hit
save it rewrites a large amount of data. Even more often if your software has an auto-save feature or are using a database rather than a document. If all these writes happen on the same memory cell, the write count could quickly add up.
10,000 cycles might not be significant for a camera that only writes when the picture is taken or music player that is primarily reading. But some people have actually worn out flash drives by installing Windows directly to their portable memory. Operating systems are constantly shuffling information on and off the disc.
There are a couple reasons this shouldn't bother you:
High-end flash drives are smart enough that they use
"wear leveling" and don't rewrite into the same cell all the time. Instead it moves your data around the physical areas of the chips so to extend its life. With this strategy you would have to write 400 TB of data to a 4 GB drive before it wears out.
For more on this subject, check out
http://www.grc.com/sn/SN-136.htm or http://www.grc.com/securitynow.htm#136 (Episode 136)
Search for rewind in the transcript or zip to 0:50 in the audio.
