Flash longevity

Jay West jwest at classiccmp.org
Sun Mar 20 14:44:46 CST 2005


It was written...
> Flash drives have a large but limited number of erases.  They make great 
> solid state drives but not for swap devices.  For a classic system needing 
> a small number of mb of swap space RAM is the best answer.

Ugggg... sorry. It wasn't a swap partition I created in flash. It was an OS 
install partition (to install the OS FROM, not to). I was learning the 
intricacies of "label & newfs" at the time, and had quite a few attempts in 
a short interval but the lexar drive died. This happened again to a second 
one in short order.

So the "writing" I was doing was formatting and loading, not general use. It 
didn't hold up well in this application at all. Based on my own experience, 
I would only use flash for emergency storage, not for something I planned to 
read a bunch - let alone write. Using it as a daily backup regimin wouldn't 
be good either.

Then again, maybe I just had two bad devices in a row.

Jay 




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