23 Sep
2008
23 Sep
'08
8:50 p.m.
There are also
CF to SD adapters (I've been seeing them in my
trolling on eBay today). There are also the CF form-factor
microdrives, but those are getting scarce too I suspect.
Somehow, I was under the
impression that the microdrives were rated
only for intermittent duty. Are there any applications that run them
24x7 as primary storage? If not, I sure wouldn't want to consider a
microdrive as a substitute for a standard-sized hard drive. Depending on the technology (SLC vs. MLC), around
100,000-500,000, if
I read the specs right. Huge for a camera or MP3 player, but not so
much for, say, a swap file.
Depends. If it does wear leveling (which I understand almost all of
them do), it becomes a lot more than it appears to be.
For example, if my "8G" microdrive were 8G of CF instead, and had (say)
a write cycle count of 250K writes, that would mean I shouldn't expect
it to wear out until after I've written approximately 250K * 8G, which
is roughly 2PB. I don't know what microdrive throughput is like (never
measured it on my z50), but at the approximately 7M/s I'm seeing right
now to a "real" disk I'm doing the write phase of a write-read-compare
test over, it takes over 9.7 years to transfer 2PB - and that means
7M/s sustained for the whole 9.7+ years.
That's best-case, not (for example) taking into account that many
writes are smaller than the underlying flash's blocksize. But even if
you derate it by an order of magnitude, it's still a lot.
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