But he goes on to say that compactFlash is 'typically good' for 10.000
cycles for high density MLC chips. I don't know how this relates to my
situation, but it doesn't sound very long to me!
If one of your concerns is # of write cycles, why would you
use one with MLC chips? Regardless, AFAIK they're all at
around 100K cycles or more now, not 10K.
One of the keys to longer life is not to buy one barely
bigger than you need. For example, suppose you had 800MB of
static files, and (roughly, rounding down) 200MB of free
space on a 2GB card. Now suppose you have temporary
internet files or whatever... on a 1GB CF card, the
wear-leveling feature will only be able to wear-level among
the remaining 200MB of free space, so if you had 50MB to
write to the card over and over again, it would only take 4
passes to have written to all of that 200MB, one time.
Now contrast that with using a 2GB card, still 800MB of
static files. You have (again, roughly) 1200MB free, so
with that wear-leveling you would have closer to 24
passes... you just realized a sixfold increase by having a
card with a lot more free space.
Lets discuss a more useful example: If an 8GB compactFlash (20MB/s) unit
were used as a windows system drive (no swap file), maybe 1.5 boots per day
and 8 hours of windows use per day, how long do we all think it would
typically last? And how would its performance compare to a Western Digital
Caviar SE16, 250GB, 16MB cache, WD2500KS?
It depends entirely on how you use the system. CF card may
not be the right answer for your generic (typical) desktop
Windows activites, primarily because Windows was designed
with the idea that it could incessantly write to the HDD
without any action on the user's part to cause it.
As I'd already written, you could use an EWF, enhanced write
filter, or a ramdrive for many things, but only you can know
what size files you'll be writing that need to be retained
inbetween reboots. Suppose for example you had a networked
fileserver you could store most things on, even run some
applications from, you have greatly decreased your need for
disk space on the PC, though the hard drive will be faster
(yet another variable, how much main system memory you have
since quite a lot can be used as a filecache).
As for how long it'll last, same story - depends on how you
use the system. If you just tried to pretend it's a hard
drive, it might not last more than a few weeks or months,
but doing basic things like disabling logging and pagefile
can go a long way, or using the EWF, you've reduced that
onto the point where there's nothing writing to it after
windows boot loader takes over, unless you commit something
to be written by manual intervention/choice. Another option
might be to have a 2nd CF card, that one used for pagefile,
logging, temporary internet files, etc, and replaced more
often.
I suggest you get your feet wet using CF for embedded or
single-purpose systems, particularly where there isnt a lot
of local file I/O after the OS has finished booting.
Frankly, Windows XP isn't the best OS to run from a flash
media, in you want to run XP you have to take the good with
the bad, and the bad means it devours system resources like
perpetual drive access, but we'd have to point the finger at
application developers too, many made nice compact apps
during earlier eras, but when they updated to support XP
(for example), they also tacked on a lot of functionality
that many people don't use, growing the app to several times
it's former size. Now that flash media is getting more cost
effective there is a growing interest in alternative apps
that can run from a thumbdrive, though you wouldnt' have to
run them from one, typically they'd be well suited to a CF -
IDE arrangement too.
