On Wednesday 06 December 2006 11:01, chrism@imntv.com wrote:
I suspect that most folks would probably wind up using the system as a paperweight long before the CF has degraded unless you were doing extremely write intensive tasks with it. The newer flash parts claim to have an "endurance" of millions of writes and and MTBF of millions of hours. Granted, I wouldn't use them to store index files for my usenet feed, but that's a LOT of writes. :) And given how the prices of CF are dropping like a stone, you could always pre-emptively rotate new parts in and use old ones in your digital camera/etc.
One write a minute to the same sector gives you a failure time of under two years (ignoring write-remapping) on a flash device verified for 1,000,000 erase-write cycles. Given this, it's at least prudent to make sure that it logs to a remote host only, or sparsely. Making /tmp (and possibly /var/tmp) ramdisks is also useful.
It might not be common to get that many writes to the same sector consistently, but considering a few easy steps can greatly extend te life of the device, it might be worth it.