archiving data, was RE: Media Longitevity/Care

[Bjørn Vermo]

On Mon, 21 Mar 2005 14:53:03 +0100, Scott Stevens <chenmel at earthlink.net>  
wrote:

> On Sun, 20 Mar 2005 12:51:13 -0500
> Ethan Dicks <ethan.dicks at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> On Sun, 20 Mar 2005 09:47:36 +0000, jpero at sympatico.ca
>> <jpero at sympatico.ca> wrote:
>> > Try to make adapter to convert from one interface to IDE interface
>> > and use CF card.  Smallest is 8MB all the way to 8GB and price is
>> > good on 1GB and below.  If one knows well with SD stuff, great!
>>
>> Flash isn't a perfect replacement for rotating magnetic media for any
>> OS that has a swap partition...
>
> Well, depending on the age of the hardware, it might be best to just
> replace the 'swap' partition/area of the hard drive being emulated with
> modern, cheap DRAM memory.  The swap area doesn't have to be
> non-volatile, after all.
>
> This depends, of course, on it being possible to specify where swap is
> located, and not to just blindly use a flash drive as a plug-in HD
> replacement.
>
The best practice is to not use swap if you use a flashdrive.
Even the newest flash generation will fail early if it gets written to too  
often.
Each block of NAND flash can be rewritten up to a million times.
This may seem to be a lot until you start doing your figures.
It is the most frequently changed block that will cause the drive to fail,  
and that will be in the file system structures.
Even with the best case scenario, the drive will wear out within two years.

-- 
Bjørn