Flash reliability

[Bob Canup <rcanup@go2fax.com>]

Vipin Malik wrote:

>
> *(subscript).Actually, I'll disagree with the statement that "regular"
> disks suffer from these same issues (to the same extent). To test the
> effect of power fail under ext2 under Linux, I have done some extensive
> (20K+) power cycles on various media.
> The media used were the M-sys IDE2000 flash IDE disks, a "regular"
> desktop harddrive, and a compact flash card.
> Now, both the compact flash and the IDE (m-sys) suffered from a
> catastrophic failure of (some) particular block suffering from some sort
> of "low level" failure (that mainsfested itself as a CRC error or sector
> unreadable error in trying to read it). e2fsck, nor any other utility
> was successfull in recovering from this problem, as the low-level IDE
> block driver bailed out due to this problem.
> The "regular" hard drive did NOT suffer from this problem. I never had a
> situation in which e2fsck -f -y /dev/hdaxx did not manage to repair the
> file system to a usable state.
>
> I did manage to come up with a way to "repair" this system, but that
> would result in a completely blank block of 512 bytes. If this block
> contained 4 inodes, I could (and did) loose upto 4 files or even
> directories and everything under them. Obviously not acceptable.
>

I think that expecting ANYTHING to function properly during power failure is
wishful thinking. I also suspect that the fact that the rotating media did not
exhibit the failures that the flash based system did has to do with probabilities;
because flash writes take much longer to occur than writes to a rotating disk the
probability of randomly encountering a condition where a failure occurs is lower on
a faster writing medium.

Even battery backed up static ram can be trashed if power loss occurs during a
write to the chip.

The only ways that I see to handle the problem are: 1. Run the flash as a Read Only
system. 2. Have a power fail detect signal which detects that the power is going
down , signals the system to flush the buffers, and holds up the power to the
system long enough for that flush and subsequent ordered shutdown to occur.





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