Ext3 and RAID: silent data killers?

Posted Aug 31, 2009 23:59 UTC (Mon) by BenHutchings (subscriber, #37955)
In reply to: Ext3 and RAID: silent data killers? by drag
Parent article: Ext3 and RAID: silent data killers?

AND SD and Memorystick and any other remotely consumer-related device. They all are 'smart devices'.

Not all. SmartMedia, xD and Memory Stick variants provide a raw flash interface - that's a major reason why they have had to be revised repeatedly to allow for higher-capacity chips. They rely on an external controller to do write-buffering, and do not support any wear-leveling layer.

When I have dealt with Flash in the past, the raw flash type, the flash just appears as a memory region

It is possible for a flash controller to map NOR flash into memory since it is random-access for reading. However, large flash chips are all NAND flash which only supports block reads.