DracorX,
I remember seeing it on the packaging of several drives. Here's a Wikipedia excerpt, which also gives us a kind of a workaround - obviously the idea is not new...
Like all flash memory devices, flash drives can sustain only a limited number of write and erase cycles before failure. Mid-range flash drives under normal conditions will support several hundred thousand cycles, although write operations will gradually slow as the device ages. This should be a consideration when using a flash drive to run application software or an operating system. To address this, as well as space limitations, some developers have produced special versions of operating systems (such as Linux) or commonplace applications (such as Mozilla Firefox) designed to run from flash drives. These are typically optimized for size and configured to place temporary or intermediate files in the computer's main RAM rather than store them temporarily on the flash drive.
Implied, if we want a "portable Mint" we''ll need to do some tinkering first... I've no idea how much, though, that's really not my forte.
On the other hand, I'm using a portable version of Firefox right now and it works well enough, despite some freezing tendencies with some websites (dilbert.com comes to mind) and the fact that updates take forever. Oh well.
