Flash life

Posted Sep 23, 2008 21:27 UTC (Tue) by man_ls (guest, #15091)
In reply to: LPC: Booting Linux in five seconds by flewellyn
Parent article: LPC: Booting Linux in five seconds

Because of the limited number of rewrites? With 100,000 rewrites and if you suspend 10 times an hour, 8 hours a day your Eee will last 3.5 years. Add some wear levelling, 200,000 rewrites or a half-full memory and you can stop worrying.

Flash life

Posted Sep 24, 2008 0:41 UTC (Wed) by flewellyn (subscriber, #5047) [Link] (2 responses)

Yeah, I'd heard that before, but Val Henson wrote a <a href="http://valhenson.livejournal.com/25228.html">blog entry</a> which made a strong counterargument.

Flash life

Posted Sep 24, 2008 6:49 UTC (Wed) by man_ls (guest, #15091) [Link]

Thanks for the link. It is not so convincing though: even without any wear levelling there is a big safety margin.

But if flash memory life really worries you, you can buy an 8GB SD memory card for $20, stick it into your Eee and place the most frequently written-to filesystems (/var, swap) on it. If it ever goes wrong you just replace it (and maybe get a new one for free if inside the 5-year warranty).

I have a similar setup and it works fine. Just be sure to buy a fast SD card or suspend will take a long time.

Flash life

Posted Sep 25, 2008 1:59 UTC (Thu) by deleteme (guest, #49633) [Link]

I've been running on Compact Flash since 2005 works fine.