Flash Hard Drives

[Jon Pruente]

On Jan 13, 2008 4:58 PM, Earle Beason <Earle-Beason at kc.rr.com> wrote:
>     There are several companies that make solid state hard drives, I was
> able to play around the samples, they seem to respond quicker then the
> disc hard drives.
>
>      I had a concern on the sustainability of memory over the lifespan
> of the device, most flash chips I am aware of have a read/write life
> span of 100,000 cycles. I am just wondering how long will it actually
> last before their is a failure

Most flash controllers do have a reserve of blocks for bad block
management so even if a block suffers a failure you might not notice
as it will be remapped.  I would think that though an individual block
might have a life span of 100,000 writes (which is the low end of
current hardware as I understand) it will be a very long time until
the device runs out of reserve blocks.

Jon.