On Fri, 15 June 2007 18:16:44 +0200, DervishD wrote: > > Yes, I understand. That's worse than I thought. I was right now > thinking about "PortableApps", a set of free software applications that > are a little bit modified to work from a pendrive in Windows. Very > useful, because you can carry your OpenOffice (or AbiWord) and Firefox, > for example, to any Windows you're doomed to use. This applications > write repeteadly to the pendrive (specially Firefox...), and I think > they may wear the drive prematurely if used extensively.
Possibly, yes. Estimates based on unknown numbers are hard, though. > So you have a zone which is unusable. Decent filesystems allow you > to mark some blocks as "dontuse" (ext2, for example). Does FAT allow > this? I don't know. If things get bad enough that you experience uncorrectable errors, I'd just trash the stick and get a new one instead. Trouble is - with a controller chip doing the error correction, you have no means of knowing when this happens. > I think I will be writing the pendrive, almost fully, once a week > (enough for an image of my home directory). That means less than 1GiB > written each week. That means 50-100 (in the worst case, making two > backups a week instead of one) writings each year in each block. Writing everything once a week is harmless. Filling the whole device is best-case behaviour. Local hot spots are the problem. Jörn -- Anything that can go wrong, will. -- Finagle's Law - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/