[geeks] Flash drive questions

[Mike Meredith]

On Sun, 6 Aug 2006 23:36:10 -0400, Charles Shannon Hendrix wrote:
> Seek time is not all of paging.  Lot's of paging is big chunks.

Well sure.

> You can get SCSI drives that run many times faster than flash, and
> with several levels of cache, the seeking isn't terrible either.

You can of course get SCSI drives with flash inside :-

http://www.m-systems.com/site/en-US/Products/IDESCSIFFD/IDESCSIFFD/Products_/SCSI_Products/FFD_Ultra320_SCSI.htm

A 320MBps burst read/write speed ? Not too shabby, although the
sustained rates (40MBps) is still slower than spinning metal.

> Plus, they are more reliable, the interface is faster under stress and
> in general, and they have extensive diagnostics.
> 
> A flash drive goes: work work work work *DEAD*, with little warning.

I haven't had much experience with flash drive failures despite using CF
cards for years (I still have an 10Mbyte one floating around somewhere).
The one experience I had, the card refused to accept any more writes but
I could still retrieve the pictures off the card.

I don't keep count but I must have seen in excess of 100 fixed disk
failures over the years, and most were far more catastrophic.