Comments on: Poor man’s SSD: Of course, you know, this means war …

By: iheartubuntu

iheartubuntu — Sun, 03 Oct 2010 14:29:29 +0000

Which OS are u running? Been wanting to do this myself for a while now!

By: Poor man’s SSD: Test results « Motho ke motho ka botho

Poor man’s SSD: Test results « Motho ke motho ka botho — Fri, 17 Sep 2010 23:04:07 +0000

[...] past 17 days, for 24 hours a day, I’ve been running dban on a compact flash card, in hopes of finding it’s weak point, making it crack, and watching it go [...]

By: The short stack « Motho ke motho ka botho

The short stack « Motho ke motho ka botho — Mon, 13 Sep 2010 01:10:38 +0000

[...] been stacking up test systems these days, in anticipation of the Mebius finishing with its “stress test” of the CF card. It’s still running, believe it or not, with no errors or problems to [...]

By: JakeT

JakeT — Fri, 10 Sep 2010 04:15:48 +0000

Oh man. This makes me want to find a T60 thinkpad in a bad way. I had one a while back, but got rid of it b/c I couldn’t see myself using it.

But w/ something light/fun and an SSD….

By: Absolute, Dream « Motho ke motho ka botho

Absolute, Dream « Motho ke motho ka botho — Thu, 09 Sep 2010 04:02:38 +0000

[...] machine is still technically engaged though — the Mebius is halfway through its “stress test” of a brand-new 8Gb CF card. Nothing to report there, except an uptime of almost a week [...]

By: IsaacG

IsaacG — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 02:25:22 +0000

Someone in my lab was doing research on SSDs. He bought some SSDs, ripped out the memory cells, built his own controller and … burnt some cells. There’s a number of people that did just that to explore how SSDs behave and wear out. The controller is set up to wear the memory equally to delay the wear out.

By: In-house shuffle « Motho ke motho ka botho

In-house shuffle « Motho ke motho ka botho — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 02:13:53 +0000

[...] of powerful machines, the second CF card arrived about a week ago, and I immediately put it to use in the Mebius. It’s every bit as [...]

By: imgx64

imgx64 — Thu, 26 Aug 2010 05:13:17 +0000

I found this article today, and thought it might be relevant. It's a bit long, but the important paragraph is:

Most manufacturers take a very closed approach to SSD firmware development - it's the secret sauce that turns cheap commodity flash with very low margins into extremely expensive, reliable, high-performance storage devices with high margins.

In short, SSDs have internal "log-structured file systems" to improve performance and decrease the wear over time. "Bare flash" devices (including CF cards) don't. If you feel adventurous, you could try a log-structured file system at the operating system level instead, such as JFFS2, NILFS, or LogFS.

By: mrreality

mrreality — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 23:20:55 +0000

Have fun with it .And remember to stock up your first aid kit.:)

By: ajlec2000

ajlec2000 — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 14:41:02 +0000

My experiences with hardrives has been an average of five years before failure. So, 69 months to go.

Actually, I’ve heard enough to encourage me to order an adapter and CF card as a backup. Maybe two. I have on occasion seen good deals on laptops with bad drives.