yup, he's a douchebag alright! the sooner those pesky open source advocates stop destroying perfectly good business models, the better off we'll all be!

Vive la Microsoft!

But with wear leveling, writes are spread across the drive, so you're not going to re-write the same place 100,000 times.

So let's say you have a 32GB Flash drive, and you can rewrite each byte 100,000 times. If the wear leveling is perfect, then that means that you can write 32GB * 100,000 = 32 x 10^9 * 100 * 10^3 = 3200 * 10^12 bytes (or 3200 TB) to the drive before you've overwritten each byte 100,000 times.

Assuming you can write 20MB/second continuously, you get 3200 * 10^12 / 20 * 10^6 = 160 * 10^6 (160 million) seconds to write all of that data.

160 million seconds / 3600 seconds/hour = 44444 hours / 24 hours/day = 1851 days.

So....if your computer was writing to the drive 24 hours a day, it would last over 5 years before every byte failed.

Granted, the wear leveling won't be perfect, and you'd slowly lose space as cells failed (not sure if 100,000 is mean number of writes before failure or minimum number of writes before failure), but most people aren't writing to their drive continuously 24 hours a day (much *much* less than that), so my numbers are conservative.