On Sun, 30 May 2010 11:48:21 +0100 Neil Bothwick wrote: > On Sat, 29 May 2010 07:59:31 -0400, David Relson wrote: > > > Indeed flash drives _do_ have a lifetime. My recollection is that > > it's in the thousands of writes if not the hundreds of thousands of > > writes. Assuming a life of 1,000 writes and you backup once daily, > > that's 3 years of backups. 10,000 writes would be 30 years. Of > > course if you backup every hour, 10,000 writes is a year (or so). > > You're assuming that each backup only writes once, which is far from > true. If you mount a drive with the sync option, the FAT is updated > for every block you write, so even a single file can cause thousands > of writes to the same location. > > > -- > Neil Bothwick
Neil, Correct -- if the USB is mounted synchronously. Normally Linux uses asynchronous writes (caching), so will hit the FAT much less often. I've tried synchronous writes and it's a real performance killer. However for a DOS formatted stick (which is the norm) the FAT does seem to be the week link. David
