[geeks] Flash drive questions

[Phil Stracchino]

Mike Meredith wrote:
> On Sun, 6 Aug 2006 15:33:27 -0400, James Fogg wrote:
>> devices can only be written/erased a certain number of times before
>> they die.
> 
> Certainly, but the problem is over-rated. Firstly, flash devices spread
> the write load across the whole device when they can. Secondly modern
> flash devices are reliable up to around a million write cycles.

Well, yeah.  But system memory gets written how often?  I'd 100% believe
any given location in system memory on a hard-working machine might get
written a million times in a year.

>> Fixed disks aren't as fast as system memory, true, but are faster than
>> flash memory. As for read speed, USB devices cannot read as fast as a
>> fixed disk due to the faster interface for disks.
> 
> Firstly flash memory isn't *that* slow ... I've seen a comparison
> benchmark of a flash-based laptop hd replacement that at worst is half
> the speed of fixed disks. It's also getting quicker faster than fixed
> disks, and that's just the consumer end of the market. 

So, at worst, hitting the flash-based portion of system RAM incurs only
about twice the performance hit of paging to disk.

Ummm..........  Dunno about you, but I'd consider that a problem.
Especially if the flash was the majority of my RAM.



-- 
 Phil Stracchino                     Landline: 603-886-3518
 phil.stracchino at speakeasy.net         Mobile: 603-216-7037
 Renaissance Man, Unix generalist, Perl hacker, Free Stater