According to Toshiba, the inventor of Flash memory: “the 10,000 cycles of MLC NAND is more than sufficient for a wide range of consumer applications, from
storing documents to digital photos. For example, if a 256-MB MLC NAND Flashbased card can typically store 250 pictures from a 4-megapixel camera (a conservative estimate), its 10,000 write/erase cycles, combined with wear-leveling
algorithms in the controller, will enable the user to store and/or view approximately 2.5 million pictures within the expected useful life of the card.” 1 For USB Flash drives, Toshiba calculated that a 10,000 write cycle endurance would enable customers to “completely write and erase the entire contents once per day for 27 years, well beyond the life of the hardware.”
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Automatic Bad Sector Remapping: .. Flash controllers automatically lock
out sections with bad memory cells (“bad blocks”) and move the data to other
sections (“spare blocks”) to avoid data corruption. During factory formatting (as
described in Section 2), spare blocks are set aside on the Flash storage device for
remapping bad sectors over time.