Poor man’s SSD: Test results

Well, for the 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 boom.

And I have nothing to report. No failures, no issues, no faults. Nothing caught fire, sizzled down to a puddle of plastic or even stopped responding to orders. It ran as instructed, then ended with a smile, asking for more.

How disappointing. 😐

The drive size is still reported the same, there are no bad blocks, and I had no consistency or validation errors. Data rates ranged from 5775Kbps to 11900Kbps, depending on when and where it was writing or reading.

 

What can I say? Sound as a pound.

Of course, that doesn’t mean it won’t go screwy the next time I turn it on. Component failure is just an ugly reality that there’s no circumventing, really.

The CF card I have in my main Pentium machine has been in use for months now without a hiccup, but certainly suffered less stress than the second. And I have no guarantee it will work tomorrow.

I have had two or three hard drive crashes in as many years, and some of those drives were only a year or two old. And I have some that date back to 1997, which are still working — slowly and noisily, yes, but working.

I think what I’m trying to say is, if there is a limit, I didn’t bump up against it. After 400-plus hours of constant reading and writing, reading and writing, I didn’t see a failure.

Personally, I can comfortably put that into the day-to-day use category without worrying about it degrading or crashing or shrinking or spitting out errors. I would suggest that the myth is just a myth.

If something happens to it from this point on, I can only ascribe that to the same bad luck that killed the other drives. I won’t blame it on the medium if it does.

It’ll just be fate. 🙂