Post #13 might be the most concise explanation of mounting flash drives that I've seen.

I remember seeing something about mounting flash drives with the noatime option in order to cut down on read/write cycles. Does anyone have any thoughts about whether that's really worthwhile?

I remembered where I read about noatime...
http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/6867

Using noatime is supposed to extend the life of the flash drive.

It does that by cutting down on the number of writes to a flash device. Flash memory has a finite number of writes the it can do before it fails (I have no idea of the number. It will just up and quit on you one day. This is a PRIMARY reason you should not run an os from a flash device)

(I had a senior moment... knew it worked but couldn't remember why until I found the link back.)

The part that I think is nonintuitive is that with FAT there isn't even an atime stamp anyway. Linux knows it's supposed to do something, so it updates the single timestamp whenever it would normally update atime, mtime, or ctime... so the updates are redundant.