Re: Compact Flash Question

[Bart Van Assche]

On Tue, May 6, 2008 at 11:59 PM, Yigal Sadgat <YSadgat1@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
> (2) An engineer at SanDisk Engineering told me NOT to do wear leveling.
> The file allocation table is written very frequently back into the flash. So
> is it really safe to assume that I don't need wear leveling???

For most Linux filesystems you really need wear leveling. E.g. ext3's
superblock is at a fixed location and gets overwritten frequently.
Without wear leveling you risk that the flash sector where the
superblock resides wears out early.

When using ext3 on a CompactFlash, you can limit the number of writes
to the CompactFlash significantly by mounting the medium with
parameters like noatime,nodiratime,commit=300.

Bart.
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