[fpc-devel] Bounty for MIPS

[Michael Schnell]

On 01/30/2012 09:47 PM, Mark Morgan Lloyd wrote:
>
> My understanding is that "naked" Flash devices have limited write 
> capability, but that "thumb drives" have an embedded microcontroller 
> that levels the wear. There is still the issue that some filesystems 
> work better with this type of device than others.
On naked Flash in fact FAT is very bad (not only) on that behalf, while 
Linux does provide several file systems that internally do the necessary 
wear leveling for naked flash chips. The file system issue in fact is 
one of things the system the wear leveling controller on those drives 
leverages. But while it improves the wear-out issue greatly, still any 
flash drive will die once all available spare memory blocks are used up.

This is why unnecessary writes should be avoided (e.g. updating the 
"last read" file-date) AFAIK, all Linux file systems can be configured 
that way.

-Michael