Baslinux mailing list

[sindi keesan <keesan AT sdf.lonestar.org>]

On Fri, 10 Feb 2006, Anthony Albert wrote:

> 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
> ===========================================================

If we put linux into the first 10MB of a 64MB card, then the linux and 
photo sections of the card would get different amounts of use, but I doubt 
we would get through that many write cycles anyway.