[CentOS] Re: Centos 4.x and embeded x86 (wrap, pcengines)

[Kevan Benson]

On Wednesday 06 December 2006 11:01, chrism at 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.

-- 
- Kevan Benson
- A-1 Networks