On Mon, 2007-04-09 at 15:28 -0400, William Bulley 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?

I know with Linux there is a "flash" file system that's optimized to
deal with this issue, purposely spreading writes over the whole disk to
lessen this problem.

That said, a system doesn't really write to the disk that much, except
for the swap file I suppose.

TTYL

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