The drive in question is only about 3 months old.

It doesn't have a swap file or partition on it. It was only used for the knoppix persistant home directory.

The drive size is 512MB. I would think that would be plenty of extra cells to use for exchanging use. It only had about 200MB of stuff on it.

My main concern was if this is the normal behaviour for flash drives that are being used as a persistant home directory, then this isn't viable technology for this purpose.

At this moment, I'm using a compact flash (512MB) (Kingston generic chip) for the replacement. I'm willing to bet that the Attache' drive from PNY was just a lemon that I, as my luck would have it, have successfully removed it from the buying populace.

According to the warranty, It has a 1 year warranty. To replace, one should return to vendor. Which I intend to try a replacement at Best Buy (where I bought it).

Thanks for the insight on how flash memory works.

Kenneth