[geeks] Flash drive questions

[Phil Stracchino]

Lionel Peterson wrote:
> Finally, I was under the impression that flash devices (say, a CF card) has a small bit of logic inside that scatters the writes around the device, and it manages collection of dead "sectors" (for lack of a better term) to avoid problems. To detect a problem with a flash device, you just need to keep track of the availble space on the device - as it declines, "sectors" are failing and the device should be replaced. That it is not tracked/managed currently doesn't mean it couldn't be...

Well, there's two types of flash RAM.  NAND-type flash RAM does have
this feature, but you can't execute anything from it, you have to page
it into system RAM to execute it ...  which would sort of defeat the
point.  NOR-type flash RAM is directly executable, but lacks the
write-distribution capability.


-- 
 Phil Stracchino                     Landline: 603-886-3518
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 Renaissance Man, Unix generalist, Perl hacker, Free Stater