Linux on the Nokia 770 Internet Tablet (O'ReillyNet) [LWN.net]

Linux on the Nokia 770 Internet Tablet (O'ReillyNet)

Posted Jul 27, 2006 8:31 UTC (Thu) by ekj (guest, #1524)
In reply to: Linux on the Nokia 770 Internet Tablet (O'ReillyNet) by jhoger
Parent article: Linux on the Nokia 770 Internet Tablet (O'ReillyNet)

If you swap to a 1GB card, *constantly* with a rate of oh, say 5MB/s then you'll have written once to the entire card every 200 seconds.

It'll take 200*100.000 seconds before you've written 100.000 times to any sector (assuming the wear-leveling routines are perfect, which ougth to be only a few percent away from true)

That is a 250 days of 24*7*365 round-the-clock swapping.

For most usage-scenarios, flash-wearout is a non-issue.

These devices *wont* typically be used 365 days a year, 24 hours a day. More like 250 days a year, 3 hours a day. (even that is very heavy use, more than the average laptop sees) in which case the flash would survive 7.5 *years*.

And even that assumes that it's *constantly* swapping at 5MB/s, which is obviously nonsense.

I find it very unlikely that you'd ever manage to wear out a 1GB flash in any setting outside of round-the-clock stress-testing for several YEARS.

And even if, buying a twice as large flash-chip will ensure it lasts twice as long.

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