[geeks] Flash drive questions

[Charles Shannon Hendrix]

Sun, 06 Aug 2006 @ 19:57 -0500, Lionel Peterson said:

> The idea is not to use the flash drive for scratch pad/temporary
> files, but nearly static files that take up a lot of space and are
> used infrequently (relatively speaking - like DLL files)...

OK, but what is the point?

A good OS already does this for you, from RAM that is way faster than
flash.

I would *HATE* if my execs were coming off flash rather than my SCSI
drive, since I almost never wait for the drive seek to get it: it's in
the drive's cache or the OS cache most of the time, unless things are
going bad.

I suppose when you are overcommitted, then fetching from a ROM based
system would be nice, but that usually indicates tuning problems.

> Also, once written they can be read infinitely without damage (as I
> understand it)...

I've heard people say that in practice, this isn't true.  It certainly
doesn't seem to be true for a lot of the consumer level stuff.

Anyone got a supposedly reliable flash that they could put through a few
million/billion reads?  Write a testable block pattern or file to the
flash, and then read it over and over until it fails you think it has
proven itself.  Seems easy enough even with a shell script.

ASIDE:

I thought magnetic memory was going to make flash a dinosaur any day
now, and that flash had upper limits that made it ridiculous to keep
using?  Reference: IEEE Computer and IEEE (standard) mags for the
last couple of years.

-- 
shannon "AT" widomaker.com -- [There is a limit to how stupid people really
are -- just as there's a limit to the amount of hydrogen in the Universe. 
There's a lot, but there's a limit.  -- Dave C. Barber on a.f.c.  ]