I’m thinking about getting one for several purposes, primarily for portable software, some certificates and keys, and a few backups. Since it won’t be powered off for more than a few days or weeks and won’t experience heavy writing (although I plan to use Veracrypt and that may cause some stress)
How long can I expect it to last? Obviously there will be backups, but I also don’t want to lose anything on it as much as possible.
What does this even mean?
I read it as occasional use on any os. If you have a Raspberry Pi running 24/7 and it’s constantly whacking that memory stick with read / writes it’s going to die faster than the USB stick you use to install Linux twice a year
It’s referencing the type of operation being done on the drive. A write operation being changing the information on the drive, a read operation being reading something from the drive. A write few read many indicates that most operations on the device are read operations/not changing the data on the device. Some examples of this would be a thumb drive being used for presentations or being used as a source to copy files to another system. These setups are fairly low write count when compared to read count. An example of a write many read many would be using the drive as a swap drive, or as an OS drive such as tails where the intent would be keeping the OS on the drive instead of just copying it to make the actual file system