Baslinux mailing list

["Anthony Albert" <albert AT umpi.maine.edu>]

On 9 Feb 2006 at 16:05, David Moberg wrote:
[SNIP]
>> Be aware that they advise against using flash media for OS installs, since
>> they measure the life of these things in (comparatively low) read-write
>> cycles and a running OS has to do alot of reading from and writing to the
>> disk.
>
>I thought that was the first generation of flash disks. I also thought that
>the limit only applied to writes, not reads. Anyway, if you modify BL3 a
>little bit, you can get it to boot into ro mode. And BL3 is so small that
>this should not be a concern.

This is so - the read cycles are unlimited, but write cycles are 
limited.  Enough of them, to the same area, will, over time, cause the 
flash device to fail.

That said, in early devices it was <10K write cycles.  Current devices 
are rated at >100K write cycles, and the controllers in the devices  
spread the write cycles out amongst the available blocks, evenly, so 
that no single block gets as many writes.

Anthony Albert
===========================================================
Anthony J. Albert                     albert AT umpi.maine.edu
Systems and Software Support Specialist          Postmaster
Computer Services - University of Maine, Presque Isle
        "This is only temporary, unless it works."
                        --- Red Green