EEPROM life expectancy?

[muddy0409]

I have read in a Microchip datasheet for a 24LC256 that the minimun data retention life is in the order of 100,000 R/W cycles. I assume this would be similar for the onboard data EEPROM in PICs?
Any ideas what the write ONCE, read many, (WORM) life expectancy would be. My project will write an eeprom full of data at program time and that's it, except for reading various locations once every second or so.
100,000 is only a day and half, nowhere near long enough.
I assume that this is a physical material type of attribute rather than anything to do with programming etc, so using RAM would still suffer from the same if it is made from similar materials???
I would need a life of a couple of years at least.

(Hope this isn't really in the wrong forum, but I am programming with PBP!)

[mackrackit]

My guess is the 100,000 is for writing as every time the program cycles the memory is read. Depending on program size and clock speed this would go by very quickly.

[Ron Marcus]

It is for write only. You can read as much as you want. Data retention is on the order of 40 years. After this, you may run into trouble!
Ron

[dhouston]

Check the datasheet for the specific PIC. For instance, the PIC16F88 datasheet says, "1,000,000 typical erase/write cycles EEPROM data memory typical" while the PIC16F84 datasheet says, "10,000,000 erase/write cycles EEPROM data memory". As Ron already noted, reads are unlimited.