Re: Swap file on USB

Anton Ertl <anton@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Yes, c't writes about special treatment for the FAT, too. Anyway,
they also write (c't 21/2007, p. 104) that they wrote various test
patterns to the same area of a USB stick 16M times (i.e., far beyond
the guaranteed number of write cycles), and read and checked them
afterwards, and did not manage to get an error. That test took days.
They did not write whether they wrote to the FAT area, though.

Thanks. I think the article you mean is this:
http://www.heise.de/ct/07/21/100/
(in German). Sadly the tests are off the end of the online copy.

Anyway, I would be more worried about the stick failing for other
reasons than from writing too often. I have a dead stick that
certainly had not reached the write limit.

I'm guessing static electricity or mechanical stress would be prime causes
for killing sticks, which shouldn't be a problem if it's always plugged in.
Power supply glitches might, but that'd affect the whole machine.

Well, two facts make it rather natural to deal with writes in a way
that helps wear leveling: flash-internal blocks are larger than the
sectors used by the interface; and erasing is at block granularity,
while writing happens at word granularity. But of course there is no
guarantee that the designers of a particular flash controller take
this natural approach.

I suppose there's one way to find out. Buy two sticks. Run one as normal.
Run the other on continuous test until it fails. When it does, throw them
both out and start again.

Theo
.

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