Ok, with any version of WM prior to 5.0, we had programs installing to ram and SD cards and BIS, personally I never installed anything in BIS, it all went to SD cards.

Ram can be written to over and over without a limitation of its write life.

SD Cards I think may have a write life, but they are so cheap they can be easily replaced

BIS has a write life and after that it becomes useless (correct me if I'm wrong)

Now that WM5.0 uses persistant storage, are we going to have a unit that in 2-3 years time is going to be a dead unit that cant be written to anymore and will need to be replaced?

As it is now, if an SD card fails, you get another one and pop it into your unit and off you go, if the memory in your unit fails, chances are its soldered to the breadboard and cant be replaced.. any thoughts on this?

This has been discussed a few times and, unless you're an extreme power user, then your BIS should live at least 10 years, and by then you won't care any more. The minimum for even a hard-core user should be 5 years.

The invention of the flamethrower suggests that someone thought, "you know, I'd really like to set those people over there on fire, but I'm just too lazy to walk."

So for the people that like to install trial softaare and remove them 100s of times(various software), still shouldnt affect them for like 5+ years?

EDIT: sorry, had I learned to read, I would have seen the post below regarding this very same issue, mods you can delete this whole thread if you want.