Flash media life span

Enverex

With all this new "Vista using Flash drives" for everything going around I thought I'd look back into them for various reasons, firstly being backups. HDs die around me all the time, floppy disks are as reliable as trains, CD's get weird coffee like stains on them which prevents them from working and are easily scratched which leaves Flash media. It has no moving parts, are VERY rugged (poor cards I used at college, been to hell and back and work perfectly still, but I've been wondering lately, what is their flaw? I was looking up new ones a minute ago and didn't realise how much the price had come down and the speeds had gone up which made them seem even more tempting, but I keep hearing about them only being able to take so many write/re-write cycles before dying, which, with the advent of Vista's new system seemed odd as that would use them heavily and would mean we'd see them dying left, right and center.

Googling left it far too ambiguous with everyone having their own oppinion on how long they last and what happens to them, so, does anyone know what is wrong with this seemingly otherwise perfect media?

RWB

They arn't that fast yet, and the amount of rewrites it's capable of.

Both of which are always getting better and better, naturally.

airbornflght

I thought flash was faster than current atapi and sata drives?, wait are we talking about the flash hard drives, or pen drives.

RWB

I don't think it matters, the fastest flash write or read speed I have seen is like 16MBps, which is no where near as fast as even my 40GB 5400RPM notebook HDD.

But I could not say for certain, just no one replied and I'd like some facts myself :P

Enverex

The highest speed cards I have seen at the moment are 140x (like the one I linked to) which is 18MB/s read and 21MB/s write. So it's getting very close to the speed of my laptops HD (24MB/s) but may come out on top simply because my laptops HD benches as a 16ms access time where as flash media has a 0ms access time.