Date: Fri, 07 Apr 2006 13:29:04 -0400 From: Chuck Swiger <cswiger@mac.com> To: gayn.winters@bristolsystems.com Cc: 'Malcolm Fitzgerald' <mfitzgerald@pacific.net.au>, "'freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG'" <freebsd-questions@freebsd.org> Subject: Re: Which BSD - Flash Drive Message-ID: <4436A160.1050408@mac.com> In-Reply-To: <002701c65a1d$55b1e0b0$6501a8c0@workdog> References: <002701c65a1d$55b1e0b0$6501a8c0@workdog>
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Gayn Winters wrote: >> [mailto:owner-freebsd-questions@freebsd.org] On Behalf Of >> Malcolm Fitzgerald [ ... ] > http://www.crucial.com/kb/answer.asp?qid=4088 > > Where they rate their own flash at 1,000,000 read/write cycles. The typical flash drive used to be rated for about 10,000 writes, but the better vendors do better. :-) They've also started doing things like "wear leveling" by rotating the sectors being written to, which help avoid hotspots forming which wear out earlier (ie, the directory entry for / or /tmp). But you need to look for that feature in your flash drives as the low-cost ones typically won't have it! You can help things out a lot by disabling file access time updating ("noatime" flag to mount), and by using RAMdisks and a no-swap config, as someone else had mentioned. But I'll repeat my caveat: if you want to run a general-purpose FreeBSD system, you're better off using a hard drive than flash. Save using flash for dedicated appliances where you've taken steps to control writes. -- -Chuck PS: I'm seeing a relatively significant number of 5-8 year old Cisco boxes starting to wear out their flash chips and fail (ie, 3 out of about a dozen or so I've had contact with over the years).
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