znanev built a free Flash Destroyer PCB.
After 13 days elapsed, the counter was still ticking and the EEPROM survived over 7 million writes. I wanted to capture the precious moment of the display showing all 7s, but again I had no luck…After 19 days since the start, I found the poor EEPROM had died…
After the EEPROM had died, I played a bit with the sources and made the display capable of showing all alhpa-numeric characters (some were not that readable, but it is hard to represent some letters with only 7 segments :)
Now I’m working on re-purposing the Flash Destroyer into a digital thermometer. I will post my success (if any) here soon.
If you build a free PCB we’ll send you another one! Blog about it, post a picture on Flicker, whatever – we’ll send you a coupon code for the free PCB drawer.
Gotta be careful with using those flash drives as poor man’s SSD. At 11mil writes to failure it will probably survive a couple months if you let the OS to keep the swap file and all those caches and temp files on it. But then, as soon as you get comfy, It’ll die …
Still I find it remarkable that manufacturers usually specify the max number of write cycles in 1/10th range of what the device can actually survive. Guess, that’s to be on a safe side.