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Date:      Sun, 21 Aug 2005 02:35:16 +0200
From:      Hans Petter Selasky <hselasky@c2i.net>
To:        freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: Parking disk drive heads
Message-ID:  <200508210235.17608.hselasky@c2i.net>
In-Reply-To: <20050820.171238.122195775.imp@bsdimp.com>
References:  <200508200359.j7K3xoHF015718@ambrisko.com> <200508201230.37976.hselasky@c2i.net> <20050820.171238.122195775.imp@bsdimp.com>

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On Sunday 21 August 2005 01:12, M. Warner Losh wrote:
> In message: <200508201230.37976.hselasky@c2i.net>
>
>             Hans Petter Selasky <hselasky@c2i.net> writes:
> : On Saturday 20 August 2005 10:18, Mike Silbersack wrote:
> : > On Fri, 19 Aug 2005, Doug Ambrisko wrote:
> : > > Flash is nice but it has some issues.  Atleast dropping it isn't one!
> : > >
> : > > Doug A.
> : >
> : > I'd be really happy if I could get a USB flash drive to last more than
> : > 8 months.  Luckily, I started weekly backups after the first failure. 
> : > That helped a lot when the second failure happened.
> :
> : Flash drives does usually not last more than 10000 writes, per bit, from
> : what I know. Probably you need some kind of special file-system that
> : moves the files around as the write quoute gets used up! Eventually the
> : size of the disk will reach zero, and you have to move the files
> : elsewhere :-) But this is probably off topic.
>
> Actually, 10,000 writes per bit is one or two orders of magnitude too
> low these days.  It was more typical for the Linear Flash PCMCIA cards
> from 10 years ago.  Today, typically flash devices are good for more
> like 100,000 or 500,000 writes per cell, and all the fobs you'd buy
> these days have built-in wear averaging.  I've tried three times now
> to wear out a flash by writing an incrementing counter to a single
> location only to give up after weeks of hammering due to external
> factors (power failure, network failure, etc).

Are you sure that the flash drive is not caching the writes in RAM?

--HPS



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