Eugen Leitl wrote: > I was thinking a real 2.5" SSD would have a MTBF comparable to a > real hard drive (SanDisk claims 2 Mh MTBF, can't find any such > for Hama SSD, which is a bargain at about 100 EUR for 4 GByte, > which probably already answers my question).
I think that "proper" ssd units designed to replace a regular magnetic hard drive have to have very sophisticated wear-levelling algorithms, and probably have an intermediate store for written data, e.g. some battery-backed SRAM or non-wearable memory. By ensuring you mount the drive "noatime" and "async" you can reduce the number or writes; mounting everything except /var/log as read-only would enforce no writing. Perhaps put /var/log into a ram disk, rotate logs frequently and rsync them to flash would help too. However, this is speculation on my part as I've never created my own unix/linux flash based system (although I do have a zaurus, but rely on the distro creaters to solve the problem!). BTW I've seen very few reports of people having problems with the microdrive in their zauruses which take the 4 or 6GB drives, but people who've replaced their microdrives with CF cards report early failures! Paul
