Simon O'Riordan wrote:
> All flash drives die eventually; the individual memory cells are worm out
> after about 100,000 operations each, and so over time the amount of physical
> memory in the drive dies off.
> Having said which, I don't know which file system is hardest on the chips; I
> have heard that Vista wears out hard drives as it can be very busy.
At Sun we had a bug raised in the early days of ZFS where folks were
using USB keys to hold ZFS pools, and they were burning out after only a
few days of heavy use because the filesystem was updating metadata in
the same locations after every I/O or group of I/Os. So, the filesystem
now moves metadata ("copy on write") rather than updating it in place.
It fixed the problem. Presumably any FS that holds volatile information
such as file access time in a relatively static location is likely to do
the same thing to it's hardware.
That said, I would have guessed that a decent SSD will be able to
retire/reallocate flaky memory locations before they fail completely.
cheers,
--justin
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