CF cards as storage - wear leveling

Jules Richardson jules.richardson99 at gmail.com
Sun Mar 19 11:06:06 CDT 2017


I just bought an IDE-CF adapter the other day with the intention of 
replacing the spinning rust in my disk imaging system (which is some 
early/mid-90s 80486-based thing).

However, the CF entry on Wikipedia says:

"Most CompactFlash flash-memory devices limit wear on blocks by varying the 
physical location to which a block is written. When using CompactFlash in 
ATA mode to take the place of the hard disk drive, wear leveling becomes 
critical because low-numbered blocks contain tables whose contents change 
frequently. Current CompactFlash cards spread the wear-leveling across the 
entire drive. The more advanced CompactFlash cards will move data that 
rarely changes to ensure all blocks wear evenly."

... I'm a little wary about the way it says "most CF cards", implying that 
there are some out there which don't do any wear-leveling at all. So, the 
obvious question: is there a way of knowing which cards are going to be 
good and which are useless as IDE replacements? Maybe by age, capacity, 
manufacturer? I'd prefer not to invest time into setting software up only 
to find that the card fails in a matter of weeks.

cheers

Jules


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