On Sat, Jan 29, 2011 at 1:42 PM, lynn
I have a 16GB usb stick running 11.3 on my laptop after the hard drive failed. It works fine with the latest kde and openoffice. Remarkable.
A replacement hard drive is not possible.
My question is about how long the stick will last. It looks as if the limit is around 10 000 writes. How long is that at eg. 24/7 for opensuse?
L x
Lynn, That's 10,000 writes per Erase Block (EB). Anything modern has wear-leveling as an attempt to keep the number of writes per block relatively even over the full set. A EB is normally 128 KB, so you have 8/meg or 8000/GB, or about 128,000 on your device. That means your good for 1.3 billion writes if you keep the writes fairly level. That's not that hard to do because everytime you write to a EB, the "old" EB is moved to the spare stack and a new EB is allocated from the spare stack. (That's done internal to the drive). The key thing is to read/write every EB several times a year thus ensuring all of them participate in the wear leveling process. The only small trouble is I don't know of a tool to do that, but if it doesn't exist it would be relatively easy to write. If it were me, I'd want to see it as a grub option. ie. Boot linux, or flash drive refresh. Thoughts from anyone else? Existing tools to do this? Greg -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org