@connorsoliver said in An Overview of Storage Devices - CompTIA A+ 220-901 220-902 Video Training by Prof. Messer:

What did he mean when he said there's only a limited number or writes on a USB flash drive.

So this is a small mistake on the A+ material. They are making assumptions about the storage media based on the communications protocol. But it's based on very common things. A standard USB flash drive using a flash memory technology that "wears out" as you write to it, but essentially never wears out as you read it.

So the way that a USB stick is "meant to be used" is that you store things on it and read it a lot. You can change it, but it isn't meant for constant writes.

So under "normal" use, USB sticks last a long time. But it you write to it constantly (like when using it as swap) you will cause the memory chip(s) to die quickly.

I found the process I had used previously. Here it is here. Summarized below.

Make sure the VM in question is shutdown.
From the console xe vm-shutdown uuid=<UUID of Your VM> xe vbd-list vm-uuid=<UUID of Your VM> params=uuid,type xe vbd-destroy uuid=<UUID of Your CD/DVD> Of critical importance do not select Disk, ensure you select the UUID of the cd Repeat step 4 as many times as you have CD's that are unusable. Reboot the VM and add the device again.

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