Date: Fri, 12 Dec 2003 20:24:43 +0200 (EET) From: Narvi <narvi@haldjas.folklore.ee> To: Matthew West <mwest@uct.ac.za> Cc: freebsd-chat@freebsd.org Subject: Re: CF cards wear out? Message-ID: <20031212201345.S83003-100000@haldjas.folklore.ee> In-Reply-To: <20031212151310.GA81432@apotheosis.org.za>
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On Fri, 12 Dec 2003, Matthew West wrote: > On Fri, Dec 12, 2003 at 08:49:05AM -0500, Francisco Reyes wrote: > > Do CF cards "wear out"? Aren't they like memory? > > They are solid-state storage devices; a bit like RAM, except they > remember what's stored on them even when they're not connected to a > power source. :-) > > The pros of using CF is that its small, requires only a small amount > of power to run and has no moving parts (no noise). > > The cons of using CF is that its storage capacity is lower than your > conventional HDDs, and it has a relatively much lower number of writes > in its lifespan (around 1,000,000 writes I think, it varies from > product to product). The number of reads is obviously much higher > than that though. > This is writes to a block (more preceicely, block erases), not writes in general. > However, if you're going to be using it to run a router or whatever, > you're probably only going to write to the thing once or twice to set > it up, and then set it to mount read-only and leave it there. > > What you _don't_ want it doing is churning logfiles every day. The > m0n0BSD image mounts /var as a memory file system, so you still get > your logfiles to watch, but they don't actually get written to the CF > card. Of course, you will lose the files when the power is removed... > Churning logfiles is an extremely OK thing for a CF, *PROVIDED* you use a reaosnably sized CF and a CF friendly file system (neither FAT nor UFS are really). it takes a loong time to overwrite 128MB card 100000 times. > If you're going to be using a system like the Soekris boards and your > project requires a media that you can do a lot of writes too, I would > recommend something like IBM's Microdrives. You should be able to fit > these inside the Soekris chassis without a problem. The NET4801 has a > Microdrive IDE connector on the board. > > -- > mwest@uct.ac.za > > _______________________________________________ > freebsd-chat@freebsd.org mailing list > http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-chat > To unsubscribe, send any mail to "freebsd-chat-unsubscribe@freebsd.org" >
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