On 03/19/2017 11:06 AM, Jules Richardson via cctalk wrote:
I just bought an IDE-CF adapter the other day with the
intention of replacing the spinning rust in my disk
imaging system (which is some early/mid-90s 80486-based
thing).
However, the CF entry on Wikipedia says:
"Most CompactFlash flash-memory devices limit wear on
blocks by varying the physical location to which a block
is written. When using CompactFlash in ATA mode to take
the place of the hard disk drive, wear leveling becomes
critical because low-numbered blocks contain tables whose
contents change frequently. Current CompactFlash cards
spread the wear-leveling across the entire drive. The more
advanced CompactFlash cards will move data that rarely
changes to ensure all blocks wear evenly."
... I'm a little wary about the way it says "most CF
cards", implying that there are some out there which don't
do any wear-leveling at all. So, the obvious question: is
there a way of knowing which cards are going to be good
and which are useless as IDE replacements? Maybe by age,
capacity, manufacturer? I'd prefer not to invest time into
setting software up only to find that the card fails in a
matter of weeks.
I have several systems that have the old Beagle Board
computer in them. They are not run continuously, but have
been run for months at a time. These use regular-size SD
cards as the "disk" for a Linux OS. I did set the noatime
flag on the file system. They are still running on the
original SD cards.
I have a Beagle Bone running LinuxCNC under a Debian-based
distro, and I fire it up at various times to text boards I
make, and it is still running the original micro-SD card.
I don't think anybody is actually using real CF cards
anymore, they are about a decade out of date.
Jon
