What's the real lifespan of modern flash drives?

  Flash drives are commonly used in electronics engineering. Almost each device has it’s megabytes, and how can it be without megabytes? There are lots of data device manufactures and all of them make a pitch of their production, they ensure us in their large resource and great reliability of their production. Claimed resource is about 100 000 of write - erase rounds. But why there’s so much advertisement about data recovery from flash drives? How many rounds a flash drive can take? Data was never cheap and I want to know exactly how many rounds I pay for. I could spit on 128 Mb flash drive for 8$, but 8 GB for 200$, that’s another pair of shoes. And I don’t want to loose data, for example, if you loose your photos that you have brought from round-the-world cruise.
 

  It’s foolish to believe manufacturer’s claims, that’s not our portion of life, that’s how the idea of checking claimed parameters of flash drives appeared. Embodiment is not perfect but as I know nobody had done this before though. And what could I do myself...But! There are plenty of us and all together we could have good statistics, couldn't we?
And now it’s time to introduce crash-test participant – 128MB Sietec, USB 2.0, 110x 
  This flash drive is almost new, it was given to me at somewhat presentation, and it was manufactured in 2006. Sietec, it is made on Hynix chip.