I'm running a"redneck SSD" made up of an IDE adapter and Compact Flash card (camera type, a 16 GB, 300x write speed unit bought used on eBay; it's significantly faster than the 4 GB platter drive it replaced) in one of my antiX systems, and I'm curious if there's any way to check how much of the 10,000 to 1,000,000 writes per block life of the Flash RAM might already have been used up? Camera RAM might get very heavy write usage (in a video camera, say, or as one of a small number of production scratch memory cards for a wedding photographer or similar) or relatively light usage (some landscape and travel photographers, for instance, buy new cards and never reuse them once filled -- still lots cheaper than film and processing was); if the former, I'd like to know it in time to shop for a good price on a replacement, and if the latter, it'd be cool to know I've got some time before the failure probability gets too high for comfort.

Fortunately,"worn out" Flash RAM (I've read) fails by rejecting writes, and remains readable, so I'm unlikely to lose data that's already stored, and I understand (from reading) that there's a"tail off" where write times get slower as the internal controller has to do more work balancing writes, invoking spare blocks, and correcting errors -- but I might be well down that slope before I notice a growing problem. What I'd like to find, if any such thing exists, is a utility that will read out the actual number of average writes per block that my particular storage device has aleady had, so I can plan for eventual failure. Is there such a thing?

cricket


cricket

LoL!

well, I have not found anything useful...

But your post does exist, and I kinda figured out what you were asking __{{emoticon}}__

Well, I was kind of afraid there was no such thing (I'm becoming more confident of that, now). I rather suspect the devices don't keep a count...