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I've seen many articles about flash drive life expectancy. They say that the life of flash drive is about 10,000 write cycles. Is this true or just a myth?

Second, Microsoft Windows Vista and 7 have a feature called 'ReadyBoost' which uses flash drives to speed booting. If flash drives really do have a short life expectancy then will using ReadyBoost greatly reduce the life of a flash drive?

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Not really programming related. – Abizern Dec 8 '11 at 21:10
Ok, I'll take care of it next time. Thanks. – Muhammad Ali Dildar Dec 9 '11 at 10:48
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migrated from stackoverflow.com Dec 9 '11 at 3:32

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Yes, it is true; flash drives have a limited number of writes cycles.


From this ReadyBoost Q&A article:

Q: Won't this wear out the drive?

A: Nope. We're aware of the lifecycle issues with flash drives and are smart about how and when we do our writes to the device. Our research shows that we will get at least 10+ years out of flash devices that we support.

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