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.