[Tfug] Small-ish (capacity + size) disk alternatives

[Yan]

Hi guys,

E.g., John's mention of "685TB of data to a 40GB (drive)" as if that
> was admirable.  Yet, that's just ~15,000 times the capacity of the
> drive (suggesting each FLASH block is rated at ~15,000 erase cycles).
>
> Said another way, if you had 39GB of "executables" (i.e., data that
> is never altered) on the drive, you might be limited to writing
> ONLY ~15,000GB over the *life* of the drive.  An application that
> wrote to the disk at 15MB/s would kill the drive in ~2 weeks! (!!)
>

You're describing dynamic wear leveling, whereas I think pretty much any
SSD worth its salt nowadays uses static wear leveling (see,
http://thessdguy.com/how-controllers-maximize-ssd-life-better-wear-leveling/).
Although
for all I know, that might not apply to the smaller, cheaper ones.


> (similarly, assuming you could write to the *entire* media "at will",
> you're looking at 80 weeks).


With the price of SSDs nowadays (provided that they do support static wear
leveling), that might not be too bad, and possibly not too much more
expensive (and if trends continue, might even be cheaper soon).

- Yan
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