Re: [Trisquel-users] The future of Libre Computing: Crowd Funding Campaign Starts Now

[onpon4]

I think you misunderstand the problem with flash memory. It's not random  
failures, but the inevitability of successfully writing to a bit on the flash  
memory for the last time (since each bit can only be written to a particular  
number of times), after which the flash memory becomes useless. Good flash  
memory firmware compensates for this by leveling this wear across the  
entirety of the flash memory.

In fact, for backups, flash memory is probably more resilient than hard  
drives. By using a hard drive for backups, you are spinning up and spinning  
down this hard drive every time you use it; that's the type of thing that  
wears down a hard drive fastest. Hard drives are still cheap, so that alone  
might make them a better backup option (i.e. you can afford a really big  
capacity hard drive more easily than a really big capacity flash drive), but  
if you have a flash drive which is a sufficient size, it's probably the  
better option.