Re: Compactflash cards dying?

Bryan Andersen
2003-02-03T07:02:48Z

Use a file system that is designed for use on FLASH devices. In general
FLASH devices are not very useable for systems that need to modify data
on the disk often.

You may wish to look at the virtual memory file system available in the
kernel if you have enough RAM. You would mount your CompactFlash device
read only and have all updates go to the virtual memory filesystem.
When you want to commit the changes, remount the CompactFlash read/write
and save the changes then remount it read only.

You would be surprised how fast a million writes can happen on a disk.

- Bryan

Pavel Machek wrote:
> Hi!
>
> I had compactflash from Apacer (256MB), and it started corrupting data
> in few months, eventually becoming useless and being given back for
> repair. They gave me another one and it is just starting to corrupt
> data.
>
> First time I repartitioned it; now I only did mke2fs, and data
> corruption can be seen by something as simple as
>
> cat /mnt/cf/mp3/* > /mnt/cf/delme; md5sum /mnt/cf/delme.
>
> [Fails 1 in 5 tries].
>
> Anyone seen something similar? Are there some known-good
> compactflash-es?
>
> Pavel