According to Fred Langa, "flash drives are new enough that there's no definitive data on long-term life spans, but there are several indicators that suggest a maximum useful life of about 10 years or 10,000 write cycles, whichever comes first. If that's the maximum life, then the safe life span for storing critically important data is probably three to five years."

Fred's article goes on:

There actually are several interrelated variables at play here, such as MTBF ("mean time between failures"), "expected write cycles," "data retention," and so on. If you can find the actual manufacturer of a flash drive, you can look up the original specs, which often include detailed information.

You can think of MTBF as a rough guide to a mythical "average" unit's life expectancy as a whole. No, it's not really that simple - what it really means is that half of all drives will have failed by the MTBF datum, and the other half will fail after that point. But in very crude terms, you can think of it as "average life expectancy" for the electronics. It's typically a very large number for solid-state devices - I've seen some flash drives claim a raw MTBF of 1,000,000 hours - that's 114 years! In any case, the basic electrical guts of a flash drive probably won't wear out in any reasonable time frame. But when it fails, it probably will be a total failure; it just won't work anymore.

Data retention is another variable: That's how long - again, on average - the device will retain its data in a usable, readable format, assuming it's just sitting on a shelf or in a drawer someplace, safe and powered off, and not subject to environmental extremes. Claims for this typically run to around 10 years. That is, of course, a guess, because flash drives haven't been around that long. And even that seems long to me - USB Flash drives simply aren't meant for long-term, archival storage. If you need to store data for a long time, I think CDRs or DVDs, suitably checked and re-recorded every few years, are a much safer choice. In any case, this kind of trouble could show up as gradual corruption of files; or as something worse if it's the master tables or boot records that decay.

And then there's the "write cycle" life. Reading data from solid-state memory is a lightweight event that places little stress on the components. But writing to Flash memory requires erasing what's there and re-recording new data; both of which involve higher energies. That's harder on the memory cells. Estimates vary, but many vendors seem OK with guaranteeing a conservative 10,000 write cycles or so; and some industry insiders say that the devices are actually good for about an order of magnitude or even two more than that - perhaps as much as a million write cycles. But when the drive "wears out" from rewrites, you could see anything from "soft" errors in individual files to a wholesale mangling of the master tables or boot records, depending on which data cells go bad, and in what quantity. There's no way to know in advance.

So what does this all boil down to? I suggest you treat Flash drives as short- and medium-term storage devices. They're relatively cheap and getting cheaper, so I don't think they're worth fussing over too much. If you're conservative about data-safety, plan on replacing the devices (or at least moving them out of front-line service) every two or three years. If you're more relaxed about data security, a 5-year replacement cycle is probably safe.

What do you do if your laptop continually overheats? There's an alternative to buying a new one - Fred Langa says it might be as simple as giving it a good dusting.

All "air-breathing" laptops/notebooks (those that rely on drawing air through the case for cooling) share at least a few similarities: there's usually one or more air intakes through which cool air enters the system; a heat exchanger that dumps excess thermal energy from the CPU or system as a whole into the incoming cool air; and one or more exhausts through which the now-warmed air exits the system, carrying the heat away.

Most higher-powered laptop/notebooks use one or more fans to assist the airflow; it's a miniaturized version of the same type of cooling system found in most full-sized PCs. But some laptop/notebook systems rely on natural convection - warm air rising - to move the air around. These systems still have case openings and an internal heat exchanger, but no fan.

Still other units, especially handhelds and some smaller, standard PCs, have no case openings for airflow. Instead, they use the case itself as a heat exchanger. These units tend to be lower-power to begin with, so they have less heat to dissipate. Overheating is a much rarer issue with these units; and any such problems are usually resolved simply by turning the unit off for a while, or moving it to a cooler spot (eg, out of the sun).

For this article, we'll focus on the true "air breather" laptops/notebooks; those that have case openings, an internal heat exchanger and (usually) a fan. And, for convenience, we'll refer to this whole class of units as "laptops," even though some of them are too large and heavy for routine laptop use. Similarly, we'll include "tablet" PCs in the general category of laptops; they fit into the discussion as long as they have case openings for cooling.

What Causes Overheating In Laptops?

Inspection:

Start the cleanup:

Wrapping Up:

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