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Life of Flash Drive

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markg
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Last seen: 18 years 3 months ago
Joined: 2006-05-24 07:49
Life of Flash Drive

Hi
I use a Sandisk Cruzer Titanium 2GB and one of the main application I have is Firefox Portable. I noticed that by default the Portable version has "History" and "Cache" set at 0 to reduce the number of writes to the flash drive and hence boost its life. However on one of the machines I use this seems to make Firefox noticeably more sluggish.
I also read today about a new Samsung laptop that uses 32GB of NAND Flash instead of a hard drive. They claim the life of the flash will be about the same as a hard drive. There was also a comment in the article that modern flash memory has a much better number of read/writes before failure. So to improve performance I've allowed my Portable Firefox to have a 7 day history and 20MB of cache.
What kind of expectation should I have about the life of the drive? Will this really cause it to fail prematurely? If it will reduce the lifetime from 10 years to 5 years I can live with it. If it reduces the lifetime to 2 months that's not so good! Any ideas?
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Cheers
Mark

Bahamut
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That reminds me: where are

That reminds me: where are cache files written if the the cache is set to 0?
A low-limit (not sure if 0 fits this) cache would result in many writes, since files would constantly have to erased and replaced to stay under the limit.

Vintage!

wsm23
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Joined: 2006-01-09 22:05
On Board System Memory?

Even if you are running an app that is portable, aren't you just loading the app into the local resident system memmory?

I don't see why that would change if you set the cache to 0. To me this means the amount of info that is stored within the browers cache file itself rather than static system memory.

Life is about the journey not the destination!

The Kazoo Spartan

Bruce Pascoe
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Last seen: 12 years 10 months ago
Joined: 2006-01-15 16:14
Nowhere...

No cache files whatsoever are written to disk if the disk cache is set to 0. Firefox will still use the RAM cache, but that will be lost when you quit Firefox.

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