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Originally Posted by medevo
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Microdrives do not typically have a limited number of write cycles. That said, the physical compontents of the microdrive (heads, rotor, motor, controller) would likely fail long before you had hit the limit of writes on the flash card.
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Microdives don't have a limited number of write cycles. But they still have an MTBF, which is really what you should be comparing. It's just that MTBFs are measured in different ways for different devices.
Manufacturer specified MTBFs are really just a best guess anyway. There is no way that they can test some of these devices for the actual time periods as specified in the MTBF figures, so they take a sample, figure out how many fail and after how long, and then they extrapolate those figures based upon some fairly likely scenarios. Then they specify an MTBF that fits with those scenarios, and is also on the conservative side (normally).
So... you should end up with devices that generally outlive the figures as specified in the MTBF... and you'd expect some of them to anyway, since it's just an average failure rate.
Ben.