Hang on a minnit! These are Flash drives, right? And flash typically has a write-cycle life of 100,000 writes! So what is the point of these? It takes 8 hours for a flash-stick install of Windows XP to use up those 100,000 writes. So I'm left wondering what the practical use of these are - unless they've now gotten to infinite-write-life for Flash.

Errr, have they? 'Cos if not, then I'd not touch one of these with the proverbial!

The "100,000 writes" figure quoted for flash memories refers to the maximum number of writes to any particular sector. Within the SSD it's possible to monitor heavily used sectors and re-map them to "spare" portions of the physical memory if and when necessary. I don't know whether the Samsung drive does this.

That's called "wear leveling" and it's been a feature of flash controller chips for many years. Read http://www.dansdata.com/flashswap.htm for some perspective.