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

[Brian Miller]

On 02/07/2013 02:31 PM, Scott Merrill wrote:
> 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.
>

My netbook came with an 8GB SD card, preformed with either NTFS or vFAT 
(I don't remember which).  I've reformatted it under Linux several 
times.  The first time I used ext2, I've formatted once with ext3, and 
it currently has btrfs.  I can't say as I've noticed any performance 
degradation.  But then, I haven't made a serious effort to track it.

I use the system as part of my automated backup strategy, so the disk 
does get some writes every night, but usually when I'm asleep . . .