On 03/19/2017 11:20 AM, Warner Losh via cctalk wrote: > Just about ANY CF card you buy today new will have wear leveling. > It's almost impossible without trying to be an ass to the card to > have it fail in a few weeks. I've run 64MB cards in Soekris boxes for > a decade w/o any problems. The key, as with all flash purchases, is > to buy the best, fastest you can rather than the cheapest you can. > But most unix systems can do many things to mitigate wear. There's > dozens of tutorials about mounting noatime (to keep access times from > being updated), to more advanced features like putting /var/tmp and > friends on memory disks, etc. With a 486, though, that might not be > an option. Not sure what kind of system you are migrating though...
If you're worried about write wear on a CF card and can do with higher power consumption and somewhat slower speed, use one of the "Microdrives" offered by IBM, Hitachi or Seagate in past years. I believe that capacity of 12GB may be the upper limit. They're comparatively inexpensive, as NOS items. I ran a 5GB Seagate drive for about 5 years 24/7 in a mailserver with no issues. --Chuck
