CF cards as storage - wear leveling

[Chuck Guzis]

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