On Wed, Mar 30, 2005 at 12:07:55PM -0500, A. Khattri wrote:
> On Wed, 30 Mar 2005, Digby Tarvin wrote:
>
> > Or perhaps a CF or other
> > solid state non-volatile storage could be used to store changes
> > for a journaled /var filesystem.
>
> BZZZT!
>
> CF cards have a finite writing life - I imagine /var on a CF would wear
> out the card pretty quickly :-)
>
I am aware of the problem, but have found it hard to get concrete
figures. That was why I was thinking of a journal cache rather then
a standalone filesystem.
I have a solid state SuSE system on an EPIA motherboard with absolutely
no moving parts (big heatsinks instead of fans, and two 1GB CF cards
in an adapter that makes them look like IDE drives:
http://www.silentpcreview.com/article141-page1.html
It has been running fine for about a year, but I have been expecting
to have to replace the system CF card any time, as nothing has been
tweaked to reduce write activity. It even does paging onto the flash.
The same issue occurs for CD-RW media. You can (and I have) put
a regular filesystem onto them, but they do have a limited write
cycle life. The biggest problem seems to be filesystems with allocation
bitmaps which can be re-written thousands of times during a file update
that re-writes the data sectors only once each. Especially on systems
that use a write-through cache.
In either case, the good thing is that when they fail it tents to be
a sector that stops being writeable rather than losing the data on
an entire drive as often happens on spinning media.
Anywone come across any statistics on flash write cycle limits?
Regards,
DigbyT
--
Digby R. S. Tarvin [EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://www.digbyt.com
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