Measure life of a CF card

unev_21 · 06-09-2009, 04:59 AM

Hi,

I have debian sarge distro installed on CF instead of HDD.
The problem is once in couple of months, my machine crashes showing IO errors. There is no option to replace CF with a HDD.

Is there any way I can measure the life of a CF card? I mean what parameters do you use to specify the life of a CF card (number of R/Ws etc)? and, how can I measure those parameters?

Any help would be much appreciated.

Regards,
unev_21

farslayer · 06-09-2009, 10:48 AM

There are a few things you can do to extend the life of the CF media..

I would recommend using the netbook instructions for lowering disk access when running on Solid State Media,.
http://wiki.debian.org/DebianAcerOne#ReducingDiskAccess

I would also not use a journaling filesystem (ext2 instead of ext3.)

another page on optimizing for solid state drives
http://tombuntu.com/index.php/2008/0...-state-drives/
.

Good luck on the number of R/W I don't think most of the manufacturers supply that info.
Buy CF media that has a lifetime warranty... so at least you'll get areplacement when you wear it out.

unev_21 · 06-11-2009, 08:28 AM

Thanks...that was indeed helpful

michaelk · 06-11-2009, 09:58 AM

FYI its the number of write/erase cycles that limit the life of flash memory. No limit on reads. Having a swap partition will also burn out a flash faster.

USB flash memory and SSDs have special wear leveling technology so that excessive write/erase cycles are spread out across the drive preventing cells from burning out faster the others but CFs do not.

tredegar · 06-11-2009, 01:46 PM

Quote:

Is there any way I can measure the life of a CF card?

There was a long discussion about this over on the eee forums a couple of years ago.
A synopsis eventually made it to the eee wiki, and you can read it here

The bottom line is "Don't worry about it".