Is flash drive wear a significant issue?

Generally speaking, Flash drive wear and tear is always brought up (SSD and USB) However, I haven't seen it.

I have personally found that cheap USB Flash drives for example go faulty and simply do not get recognised well before you actually see wear and tear.

Also, newer drives use technologies that randomise the locations of writes. I suppose, lets say you have a 100 GB drive and fill it up with 99.5 GB's, then you keep using .5 GB over and over again, you can reach the limit, but again, I use SSDs and USB sticks on a daily basis for very heavy use (over the past few years) and generally speaking, the drives die of general failures well before you see this as a problem.

No Experience with alternative File Systems, However I personally wouldn't bother... Use a mature file system and if it fails within a usable time, take it back under warranty. (if in the UK, up to ~6 years under the sale of goods act as you can say it was designed with a fault and not fit for the purpose of storing data... I am not a lawyer, but I took a laptop back 4 years after buying for a similar reason).

Also, for Windows just maybe worth a look in, I remember seeing a product from Diskeeper, that looks interesting - meant to optimise and extend the life of SSD disks, but I am wondering if it is needed and found several articles doubting it (only linked to one) and goes in to detail about wear and tear. Also, I can not longer see the product on their website, so it must of either been scrapped or built into a different edition.

Installing windows on a compact flash card showed this problem very obviously, killing the card within days under certain typical usage patterns. (Linux is a little easier on them)

SSD drives have wear leveling to extend this to years. If you fill the drive up 90% and then keep making writes it will swap out the files which have remained unchanged in order to extend the flash's lifetime.

Defragmenting does not help on a flash drive because the underlying data is not stored in the pattern that the OS sees. You need to use vendor specific tools.

Flash specific filesystems could extend a drive's lifetime further but at the moment I think this is largely made irrelevant by the progress of drive technology. How many hard disk drives do you actually use that are older than 5 years?

The other point is that when blocks fail, they fail on write so you don't really need to worry about data corruption as with an old magnetic drive that is failing.

So basically as long as your drive has wear levelling it is not really something you need to worry about.

SSD drives use flash based on the 100,000 write cycle technologies, not the 1000. We haven't had flash drives running that long in the real world, but really, except for perhaps the page file on a normal system, the drive isn't getting that many writes. And modern drives do some wear leveling, and automatically compensate for a few bad blocks.

I give the following advice: If you are not doing something insane (a data logger that fills the drive 500 times per second) don't worry about it. Keep good backups, use the system, and in all likelyhood you're going to replace it for faster/bigger parts long before you hit the flash write lifetime.