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

[Scott Merrill]

On Thu, Feb 7, 2013 at 2:22 PM,  <jep200404 at columbus.rr.com> wrote:
> 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.

I should have qualified. I understand that all media wears out through
use.  What I'd like to avoid is mechanical failure of the mechanisms
involved in spinning platters around, or the heads responsible for
reading and writing to them. I'd like to not worry about damage that
might result from dropping the media, for example.

> 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.

Is there a rule of thumb for measuring this?  I understand it will
depend on the specifics of usage, but any guidelines would be helpful.
Does flash media generally wear out twice as fast as a regular drive?
Three times as fast?  Considering that regular hard drive life is
generally measured in years, am I looking at a single year for flash?
Less?

> 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.

How much faster, in general?