[Shop-talk] OT flash drives

[Pat Horne]

My understanding of flash drive wear out is that it’s not as bad as it seems. While the write count is in the thousands, it takes a long time to get there. The flash file system spreads the writes - even rewrites out to even out the writes on the media. Let’s say you have a number that you increment as a counter. Each time it is rewritten it is written in a different place, making the drives pretty robust. Another thing, when a location eventually dies, the previous data is still there, just becomes read only, so the data can bee retrieved. 

Peace,
Pat

Pat Horne 
We support Habitat for Humanity


> On Mar 14, 2020, at 1:57 PM, Jeff Scarbrough via Shop-talk <shop-talk at autox.team.net> wrote:
> 




> On Sat, Mar 14, 2020 at 2:45 PM Steven Trovato via Shop-talk <shop-talk at autox.team.net> wrote:
> Why is that?  At first glance, I would think that something with no 
> moving parts would be more reliable than something with moving parts, 
> if both are manufactured to the same standard.

Flash memory has a limited number of read-write cycles.  It's usually a large number, but the process is inherently riskier than magnetic memory (or so I'm told).

Modern hard drives park the heads when it's not in operation, so if the drive isn't spinning, it's difficult to damage the media short of a long drop or submersion.   
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