Perhaps this will help shed more light on things.
From Wikipedia:
"Another limitation is that flash memory has a finite number of program-erase cycles (typically written as P/E cycles). Most commercially available flash products are guaranteed to withstand around 100,000 P/E cycles, before the wear begins to deteriorate the integrity of the storage...This effect is partially offset in some chip firmware or file system drivers...this technique is called wear leveling...For portable consumer devices, these wearout management techniques typically extend the life of the flash memory beyond the life of the device itself, and some data loss may be acceptable in these applications. For high reliability data storage, however, it is not advisable to use flash memory that would have to go through a large number of programming cycles. This limitation is meaningless for 'read-only' applications such as thin clients and routers, which are programmed only once or at most a few times during their lifetimes."
