[geeks] Flash drive questions

[Charles Shannon Hendrix]

Mon, 07 Aug 2006 @ 19:15 +0100, Mike Meredith said:

> 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.

That's a drive for the narrow market where power is often failing.
That's why it uses flash.

Personally, I rather spend the money on making the power stable.

> > 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.

They are pretty tough physically, but I've seen a lot of failures on
them and they don't give a lot of warning.

> 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.

Most of those I've used gave warning about the failures so I had the
data off long before they failed.  Also, most of the failures were
graceful.  Of course, you do have to check your drives now and then, and
I think the industry and OS software have both been lax at making this
work well.  A lot of drives either lie or fail to report their status
properly, but thankfully that's changed a lot in recent years, even on
some low end drives.


-- 
shannon "AT" widomaker.com -- ["The trade of governing has always been
monopolized by the most ignorant and the most rascally individuals of
mankind.  -- Thomas Paine"]