LiveUSB and PackageKit Updates

Joshua Daniel Franklin jdf.lists at gmail.com
Tue Oct 14 14:03:39 UTC 2008


On Tue, Oct 14, 2008 at 6:48 AM, Michael Solberg wrote:
> I'll try this while I'm testing tonight.  I've noticed that the loop
> filesystems eat a ton of CPU cycles when the system goes into swap.
>
> Does anyone have concrete data on the maximum number of writes on an SD
> card?

This came up on slashdot a while back. I have not tested myself, but
apparently the newer generation of SD have pretty good life, 2 million
or so writes per block and built-in wear leveling so that's spread evenly.
That's what makes it worth shipping flash-based hard drives in the
MacBook Air and similar.

For example, this site tried to come up with a worst case for a 64G disk:
"2 million (write endurance) x 64G (capacity) divided by 80M bytes /
sec gives the endurance limited life in seconds. The end result is 51
years!"
http://www.storagesearch.com/ssdmyths-endurance.html

So it's not as bad as you might fear, but performance is still an issue.




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