[geeks] Flash wear leveling

[Jonathan Groll]

On Thu, Feb 21, 2008 at 05:27:58PM -0500, Alois Hammer wrote:
> * Modern consumer parts (what I'll be using -- either SD or CF,
> probably) "have wear leveling."  I've tried contacting several major
> manufacturers (incl. Transcend) to find out if SD comes preformatted
> as FAT16 and SDHC as FAT32 for a good reason, or if someone's made
> breakthroughs in wear leveling that don't require the controller's
> knowledge of the underlying filesystem to work.  I've gotten no
> responses whatsoever.
> 
> * My best guess, based on available information, is that if I start
> tossing UFS or ext3 or other filesystems onto flash memory, wear
> leveling goes out the window.
> 
> Even the tiniest scrap of information would be a big help.  TIA.

My understanding as to why flash devices come FAT formatted is that it
allows the widest range of operating systems to write to the
filesystem out of the box.

Regards,
Jonathan.