19 Mar
2017
19 Mar
'17
11:42 a.m.
On 03/19/2017 11:20 AM, Warner Losh via cctalk wrote:
Just about ANY CF card you buy today new will have
wear leveling.
It's almost impossible without trying to be an ass to the card to
have it fail in a few weeks. I've run 64MB cards in Soekris boxes for
a decade w/o any problems. The key, as with all flash purchases, is
to buy the best, fastest you can rather than the cheapest you can.
But most unix systems can do many things to mitigate wear. There's
dozens of tutorials about mounting noatime (to keep access times from
being updated), to more advanced features like putting /var/tmp and
friends on memory disks, etc. With a 486, though, that might not be
an option. Not sure what kind of system you are migrating though...
If you're worried about write wear on a CF card and can do with higher
power consumption and somewhat slower speed, use one of the
"Microdrives" offered by IBM, Hitachi or Seagate in past years. I
believe that capacity of 12GB may be the upper limit. They're
comparatively inexpensive, as NOS items.
I ran a 5GB Seagate drive for about 5 years 24/7 in a mailserver with no
issues.
--Chuck