Re:What About The Number-Of-Writes Limitation? (Score 1)

Also, how are they coping with the fundamental limitations of flash? As I understand it, on flash you can write a few sectors at one time, you can read as much as you like at a time, but you can't OVERwrite data in place, instead you have to write it somewhere else, and keep a note interally that the original location is now invalid and ought to be erased. Also you have to erase in BIG chunks which takes a long time. AND you also have to copy any data which is still valid to some other location before you can erase. In other words - LOADS of overhead.

So, to fit a filesystem such as NTFS which was designed around the assumption that you can write and overwrite without restriction onto a flash device, there must be a big overhead in marshalling all this data into the flash.

In addition, the device has to do wear levelling in order to prolong its life given the limit of X write-erase cycles. AND NTFS is notoriously bad for fragmentation. How does the device cope with that?

How would such a device cope with a swapfile, which may have small parts of it being overwritten VERY frequently?

Perhaps this should only be used on a machine with sufficent RAM that swap is not required....????

I'd be very interested in a real life review of a machine with a flash hard drive. I bet there are going to be all sorts of problems with it cropping up over time.