Is there a way (or software) that can determine the life of a USB flash drive? or does it just fail with no warning?
Apparantly HD Tune may be able to test the condition of it.
See the manual link on right.
Flash drives have redundant spaces to allow for some failure - youd need a special firmware reader to identify if the firmware has any known bad blocks its not writing too anymore and the ones I know of are proprietary. With wear levelling these days it wont wear out quick anyway.
Hi Pfipps
I started a topic that may provide some useful Info http://forum.piriform.com/index.php?showtopic=11774 mainly to find out about defraging flash drives, and if it had any positive or negative results "reduced life" of the device.