On Fri, Aug 10, 2001 at 09:01:30AM +0200, Bruce Martin wrote:
> Slightly off topic here: how many times can you read and write these CF
> cards before you have to throw them out? What constitues as one write - does
> it buffer a whole lot of small writes and do them at one time?

FLASH memories can be rewritten 10000/100000/1000000 times depending on the
chip design (new chips are better).  The CF cards are intelligent and try
to "load" all FLASH blocks (sectors) equally so that no block wears out
before the others (ie. if you keep storing and erasing a small file, the file
will be stored in different blocks at different times, so no block wears
out while other blocks are not used at all).

I don't know what the sector size of the FLASH chips in CF cards is, but if
it's small enough, every disk block (512 bytes) written is stored in one
or more FLASH sectors, so writing 1 or 1000 disk blocks writes only once
per FLASH sector.

I've got a flu, my brain is not functioning at all.. sorry ;)

  -jm