In message <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, Mathieu Arnol d writes: >+-le 14/12/2005 17:45 +0100, Alexandre DELAY =E9crivait : >| Don't you think that flash drives are also a good solution? >|=20 >| I am sure that it will be the future replacement for hard drive disks. >| see http://www.memtech.com/ for example >|=20 >| With no buffer and 1ms access delay you minimise write failures. It is an >| interresting solution. > >Hum, flash has a *limited* ammount of possible write for each cell, for low >cost, it's between 10K-50K and for heavy duty, industrial grade, bla bla bla, >it's around 2M, so, hum, just imagine you have a solid state flash disk, and >your swap on it. One day, your box begins swapping hard, and some time later, >half of your drive can't be written to again...
Sorry but that is not how flash devices work. There is a very important piece of technology called a "flash adaptation layer" which performs what is usually called "wear levelling" in an attempt to get the maximum amount of lifetime out of the entire device by using a dynamic logical to physical mapping and keeping track of bad cells etc etc. Yes, you will kill a flash by doing a lot of writes, but it will not develop individual bad sectors like a disk. -- Poul-Henning Kamp | UNIX since Zilog Zeus 3.20 [EMAIL PROTECTED] | TCP/IP since RFC 956 FreeBSD committer | BSD since 4.3-tahoe Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence. _______________________________________________ [email protected] mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-hardware To unsubscribe, send any mail to "[EMAIL PROTECTED]"
