Compact Flash lifetime/failure detection?

Philip <[email protected]>
Newsgroups gmane.comp.hardware.soekris.technical
Message-ID <[email protected]> 
The 4G CF card that I use to boot my MiniITX server died over Christmas.
I pulled out the card, repartitioned and formatted it and tested it with
F3write/F3read and most of the card appears to be unusable.
This server is (was) running Debian with the CF card in an IDE adapter.

I am now worried that my Soekris could go the same way.  That machine is
net5501 running FreeBSD.

Is there any early warning that I can get of CF card failure?  Are there
any long life cards that are suitable for a general purpose OS.
Should I just forget about CF cards and just boot a normal drive?

thanks, Philip
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