Kclug Digest, Vol 42, Issue 11

[Bradley Hook]

Oren Beck wrote:

> Write once read many,. and CHEAP disposable drives as flash drive. Being 
> serious- how much use will it thke to kill even a swap device? Then we 
> look at a 1gb device being Eight bucks- ok we round it up to ten to 
> cover travel and taxes etc.Ten bucks a GB for "Sacrificial Flash" may be 
> an experiment worth kicking around?

Supposedly cheaper flash units can sustain fewer than 100,000 writes, 
but better ones can handle upwards of 500,000. Now, I've also read that 
a lot of systems attempt to spread the writes over the media rather than 
repeatedly writing to the same location. I assume that such a feature 
would be in the fs software, rather than in the flash hardware itself, 
so fs choice is also something you will want to strongly consider for 
your experiment.

So, with a 1GB flash @ 30MB/s write speed (mine can only do about 
9MB/s), with a fs that attempts to distribute writes over different 
sectors, constantly writing, you would have hit the rated max writes of 
500,000 writes per sector at about 6-7 months (I think).

However, most people use FAT32 (for compatibility), and continually 
write over the same sectors, in which case you could feasibly kill 
sectors of the same type of drive in only minutes (if you were trying).

All of this is based on maximum write speed being maintained for the 
entire time... not going to happen.

Of course, I could be completely wrong :)

~Bradley