USB Drive worries

In all the posts I've read, by SO many users, I've only read about three drives dying. That's all i can say. They didn't even say it was related to portableapps.

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I felt so different without a signature.

Portable Apps used on some drives will kill them early, just because they generally write to the disk a lot. Most, though, will run the normal year or so. Mine, running Portable Apps since November 06, ran for 3 years. I would say that a case of killer portable apps is rare.

Kevin Porter
"What can you say about a society that says that God is dead and Elvis is alive?"
--Irv Kupcinet

-Please search before posting

I wouldn't be worried about it, but understand it. As with light bulbs, there's a best guess at the number of times you can flip the switch before it burns out.

From wikipedia;
The flash memory chip is a close relative to the EEPROM; it differs in that it can only be erased one block or "page" at a time. Capacity is substantially larger than that of an EEPROM.

It's a bit hard to describe how this works, but I'll try to shorten it. With standard memory it takes electricity to store data and hold it. Once the power is of, the memory is emptied. With EEPROM, again it takes electricity to store data, but none to hold it there. Reading data from the drive does no harm, but storing data does. Like the light bulb, there is a number of times you can flip the switch.

One drive I had for three years, another lasted less then a year, but it was used to move large amount of data around.

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Did you know that the entire operating system use to fit on a 5 1/4" floppy disk!
And that was after tape!