Life of USB stick

I have Corsair Survivor USB sticks. One is 8GB bought in January 2008. It's normally connected to my desktop PC and used regularly for simple backups and also for transfers between computers.

I have no problems with it, at the moment, but wondering what sort of life I might reasonably expect, and what the symptoms might be of it dying.

Any thoughts?

I should add it's not the only backup so losing the contents would be an irritant rather than a disaster.

I have some quite old ones, and none have stopped working, however several of the smaller ones of old have vanished and I have no idea where they are, but at 128mb that is no great loss.

The more you overwrite the same bits the quicker they will fail - but generally they can do thousands of times. It depends to some extent on how good the logic is on the stick - if it is good then it will recognise and mark bad bits and will also cycle the bits it uses (so that it isn't putting undue stress on a small portion of the stick).

The issue is will you know it has gone wrong? How often do you do a complete restore from the stick and compare it to the original? It could already be broken but if you aren't doing any comparisons then you may never know for sure.

Given that the technology is much the same as SD/SDHC or CF cards the best people to ask would be professional photographers - they will use a card during the day, download the data, delete the images and then reuse the next day.

Find a suitable forum such as the Canon one at photography-on-the.net and ask for their experience of both number of cycles and longevity.

In reply to a post by ian72:

The issue is will you know it has gone wrong? How often do you do a complete restore from the stick and compare it to the original? It could already be broken but if you aren't doing any comparisons then you may never know for sure.

I do use it from time to time to move several GB between PCs so if there was incipient failure I'd have found it - I think