Compact Flash / IDE Adapter - Average Life?

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scoob8000

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May 4, 2002
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I've always hear how flash media is only good for so many write cycles...

But in reality, if I were to use a quality CF card as the HDD in my smoothwall, how much life could I expect out of it? (Weeks, Months, Years, etc)

The only thing I can really imagine being written are log files. I have plenty of ram in the box, so swap shouldn't be an issue.
 
I would guess on the order of years - more with a purpose-designed filesystem.

PS: you could set up logging to another box if the load is low enough - it's easy and it has the potential to eliminate writes entirely.
 
Wow this is actually pretty impressive..

So, this means that in order to exhaust the drive in ten years, one would have to write to EVERY BLOCK in the device about 2.7 times per day, every single day. We simply can’t conceive of such a usage scenario; this would mean that on a fairly typical 8 GByte drive, one would need to write over 21 GBytes of data to it every day for ten years! USB flash drives simply are not used in this way.
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Heck, at the price some CF's are going for and how cheap adapters are, I could put the OS on one, and use a smaller drive for logging even!
 
there is mod for smoothwall that sets it up for use with cf, basically you disable swap, and write logs to ram drive, logs are then saved to cf on reboot/shutdown and restored back to ram drive on boot up.
 
Would you even need a CF card and IDE adapter? Some motherboards can boot from USB and flash drives are cheap now.
 
Would you even need a CF card and IDE adapter? Some motherboards can boot from USB and flash drives are cheap now.
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Good point! I have a wireless webcam w/a USB port-not so much to boot off of-but for stand-alone recording
 
Because most operating systems won't boot and run properly from USB without modification. :)

I actually just picked up a CF to ide adapter for under 5 bucks shipped. :)
 
I have several pfSense firewalls deployed using CF cards, they've run for years with the same cards. With CF, the reads are pretty much indefinite, it's writes that eventually degrade the card. As long as you disable swap, and have a read-only file system, it'll run as long as the machine itself does.
 
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