conserving CompactFlash writes

  • Thread starter Thread starter Dan Jacobson
  • Start date Start date
Previously Dan Jacobson said:
In http://www.toshiba.co.jp/p-media/english/support/cf_faq.htm it says
CompactFlash's "number of times of writing : 100,000 times."
Click to expand...
So how does one do his writes wisely to conserve the number of writes
made?
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Does e.g., Unix's
$ cp *.txt /compactflash
use only one write? Or it is one write used per disk block, etc.?
Click to expand...

Unix is more difficult: Most Unix filesystems keep an "last accessed"
timestamp for each file. So you are writing the disk on each read
to a file!

One solution is to use a RAMDISK and copy files over to flash
e.g. once an hour. If you need to read the flash, mount it
read-only.

One other thing: That is 100.000 write times per individual sector.
The overall number of writes does not matter. It is just the
number of writes in each specific place.

Arno
 
Unix is more difficult: Most Unix filesystems keep an "last accessed"
timestamp for each file. So you are writing the disk on each read
to a file!
Click to expand...

It could be mounted with the "noatime" option to stop that behavior.
 
It could be mounted with the "noatime" option to stop that behavior.
Click to expand...

Yes, that is one thing. Another is to turn of logging to
disk completely. Otherwise you will have some inodes modified
all the time.

There are Linux distros aimed at being run from flash. These
should already include most of the things that can be done.

Arno
 
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