<html><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; "><br><div><div>On Jan 22, 2008, at 1:01 PM, John Drescher wrote:</div><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"><blockquote type="cite">On Jan 22, 2008 3:49 PM, Dewhirst, Rob <<a href="mailto:dewey@ku.edu">dewey@ku.edu</a>> wrote:<br><div class="gmail_quote"><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"> My frontend has been running off a 2GB CF for quite some time without<br>problems. Booting is slower, but performance otherwise doesn't seem<br>affected.<br></blockquote></div><br>The most important thing here is that the CF card has wear leveling built in or you use a file system that supports that. If you get a large enough CF drive and have wear leveling it should take quite some time to wear it out considering how slow the CF writes data and that each cell can take 100,000 (or more) writes before failure. </blockquote><div><br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div><div>I would be surprised if commodity CF cards didn't all have wear leveling. Otherwise they wouldn't last long in their typical application, which is a camera or MP3 player using a FAT filesystem. FAT is nearly a worst case for a non-wear-leveled flash device because the allocation table is always on the same sector, and must be updated with every write.</div></div><br><div>Still, I would use some common sense measures to reduce the number of writes, like using the 'noatime' mount flag.</div><div><br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div></body></html>