I am guessing the write cycle numbers are pr bit, as unless the USB stick has crap all wear leveling it can survive way more than 3000 cycles.<p>Frankly the only documented case i recall is of someone killing a USB stick was back during the early MB days, when someone mounted it with the sync option under Linux. This, in combo with it being FAT formated, resulted in the bits holding the allocation table getting a whole lot of writes.<p>Without the sync option, the stick would probably have survived for quite some time as the table would get updated less frequently.<p>These days you are unlikely to see such a problem unless you are scraping the bottom of Ebay listings.
imagine if ssds didn't actually exist as a consumer product but was just constantly brought up by large companies as the "next big thing!" that never actually came out.<p>i mean intel, and hp all have their own versions and they've been working on them for years and we've yet to see anything come of it. i'm not holding my breath for this to actually get released.
IBM is spinning the news a lot lately: here they claim to made a breakthrough in antiviral protection <a href="http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/49706.wss" rel="nofollow">http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/49706.wss</a> (humans, not computers viruses)
Here is a paper from 2011 where they claim 7 or 8 bits/cell
<a href="http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/login.jsp?tp=&arnumber=5873227" rel="nofollow">http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/login.jsp?tp=&arnumber=587322...</a><p>This research seems to take program/erase cycles into greater account.
This kind of technology could have been great for telcos 10 years ago before virtualization went mainstream.<p>Sadly today servers take a long time to boot (up to 6 minutes) making this ineffective for a baremetal server in that must give five nines uptimes.