[colug-432] MicroSD cards: pysical wear and tear

[jep200404 at columbus.rr.com]

On Thu, 7 Feb 2013 10:43:19 -0500, Scott Merrill <skippy at skippy.net> wrote:

> I currently have a traditional external USB HDD (read: rotational
> media) attached to this. The use case for this system doesn't merit a
> solid state hard drive, but I could use USB sticks or SD cards to
> avoid physical wear and tear.

Flash memory has physical wear[1] when writing to it. 
The number of erase/write cycles before it wears out, 
has been improving, but it much much lower than for a 
regular hard drive. 
If you have read-only partitions, then flash will last 
longer than you care about. If you're constantly writing to it, 
then expect it to wear out faster than a hard drive. 
Wear leveling in better quality flash memory mitigates, 
but does not eliminate. Hint: the reason they call them 
"_wear_ leveling algorithms" is because of _wear_, 
which is what you said you were trying to avoid. 
Don't put swap on flash memory. 

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flash_memory#Memory_wear
    For fun yikes, read following "Read disturb" section also.