Re: Sync option destroys flash!

[Jon Masters <jonmasters@gmail.com>]

On 5/13/05, Måns Rullgård <mru@inprovide.com> wrote:

> Alan Cox <alan@lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk> writes:

> > On Gwe, 2005-05-13 at 20:10, Michael H. Warfield wrote:

> >>  But how do you determine which are
> >> "decent" keys?  They don't put stickers on them saying "this one is
> >> decent" and "this one is junk" and I'm an old cynic who has learned that
> >> price is not always a good indicator either.  Maybe the guarantee will
> >> be a clue.  I've just got to shop for it more.
> >
> > Or it may even be cheaper to "burn" a few - buy one of each type from
> > various shops, do 2 million writes to the same sector and take them back
> > the next day if they died [And publish the review data 8))]
> 
> It's probably a good idea to get from different shops, or someone
> might get suspicious when you take them back.

Not really. I doubt the person in the shop will care.

Incidentally, I've discovered that you really don't want to buy flash
devices from camera shops. It would seem that, like I guess might be
the case with certain "audio CD" blanks you buy in stores, they don't
seem to care about selling you a device with one or two known-bad
sectors. You won't notice 512 bytes of lost data in many JPEG images
(not that I am saying it's a good practice to have) but my Zaurus
/did/ notice when I couldn't reflash it from a CF card with a fault
somewhere around 8MB. After quite some time of screwing around with
the filesystem by hand, I was able to ensure that something else was
occupying the sector in question and eventually was able to reflash
(all because it was a Sunday afternoon and we have silly Sunday
trading laws here).

When I took the CF card back to the camera shop, I took the Zaurus and
did a test on potential replacement cards while in the store -
explaining that my PDA had a "CompactFlash tester" installed, or
something like that. It's amazing what you can get away with - akin to
spending an hour in the store when I got my replacement Powerbook
after finding a single bad pixel, testing every unit to find one
without any, just to be happy :-)

Jon.