On Mon, 12 Mar 2018 22:34:44 +1100
> I keep hearing about longevity issues with flash based storage. It > seems this paranoia just won't die. > It is not paranoia but dependent on use cases! The OPs concerns have a high chance to be unfounded however. > I'm coming up to 13 years of installing OpenBSD onto flash based > storage and I've not had a failure yet. That isn't surprising. If you take the lowest power flash with the worst guarantee of 10,000 writes as oppose to the 100,000 write flash then even with KARL that would allow 27 years of daily boots, right. Scratch/swap space is rarely used with the memory available in modern systems too. That is also assuming the same sectors are written each time. Also, cheap onboard or flash sticks are very different to SSD with built in write management and space reservation. High write use cases could be an issue however, perhaps sql databases and partition table updates are an issue? Additionally I have had adoptable sd on Android have a weird failure where I couldn't wipe or write anything new but could always read the data back atleast after a replug so it is possible that you may not always detect failures. I don't use adoptable SD on Android any more despite wanting to. I assume but I am not sure how SDs differ to onboard phone memory though or the management differs for the experimental feature or perhaps it was just an odd hw failure where sw thought the writes had occurred but they had not physically?
