There are several ways this may be dealt with:

1. Most modern operating systems understand flash based media and have
special modes for them (Windows, Linux, probably OS X).  Typically
they do not perform unnecessary writes, and do provide simple wear
leveling, as well as fairly advanced caching.

2. All hard drives have some amount of caching RAM, so writes are
reduced further for frequently changed files.

3. Flash based drives typically have a very high reliability first or
boot sector which is generally guaranteed not to fail for the life of
the drive

But on a 32GB drive where the typical office worker only needs about
20GB, and over 80% of that is information that doesn't change
(programs, reference material, etc) then even simple wear leveling
will allow the user to write/rewrite their 4GB of actively used data
files over 400,000 times before one needs to worry about flash
failure.

It's simply not an issue with the "typical" computer user, even if the
OS is flash unaware, all of it can be taken care of at the drive
level.

A power user, however, may cause it to fail more quickly, but the
power user also typically replaces their main computer every year or
two and probably wants more drive space (in the form of a second,
slower, larger drive) so it may never impact them as well.

The only area where the flash drive would hurt is RAM to disk memory
paging.  I suspect that laptops fitted with these newer drives will
have a ton of RAM, and no (or very little) virtual memory on the
drive.  This would also cause the computer to appear more "snappy"
which would lend to the idea that flash drives are faster, but
eventually the user may run into "out of memory" errors when starting
yet another program, or if they frequently run programs that have
memory leaks.

-Adam

On 4/9/07, William Bulley <web@umich.edu> wrote:
> In the news recently:
>
>    http://news.digitaltrends.com/article12453.html   [32GB Seagate]
>
> and
>
>    http://news.digitaltrends.com/article12556.html   [64GB Samsung]
>
> are new solid state devices (disk drives?) of enormous capacity.
>
> If these were actually used in any modern system (Linux, Windows CE,
> PalmOS, etc.) what would be the life expectancy of the device?  The
> operating system can not help but hit the disk many (hundreds?) times
> per second, but the technology used in flash memory is limited to a
> relatively small number of write or format cycles.  How would these
> drives compare?  Would they do as well?  Better?  Would RAM memory
> be used for normal operation while writes to disk be reserved for a
> few, infrequent updates to critical state information?
>
> Regards,
>
> web...
>
> --
> William Bulley                     Email: web@umich.edu
>
> --
> http://www.piclist.com PIC/SX FAQ & list archive
> View/change your membership options at
> http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/piclist
>


-- 
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Moving in southeast Michigan? Buy my house: http://ubasics.com/house/

Interested in electronics? Check out the projects at http://ubasics.com

Building your own house? Check out http://ubasics.com/home/
-- 
http://www.piclist.com PIC/SX FAQ & list archive
View/change your membership options at
http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/piclist