Thread: E-Books vs. Dead-Tree Books: An Alternate Dialogue
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Old 03-02-2008, 10:29 PM   #65
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Quote:
Originally Posted by DMcCunney View Post
And there's a technical limit that can bite: flash memory is limited to about 100,000 writes before failing.
That doesn't affect most of us - static memory and cards in our lissooses have the same problem, and they all have controllers that rotate the writes to mitigate it.

At the risk of introducing maths to the debate let's try doing the numbers. If you could get 3Gb/s (SATA II) out of it, your 64GB disk has 64x8 = 512Gbits in it, so takes about 170 seconds (3 minutes) to write to the whole thing. Then 3 minutes to read back. Times 100,000. 600,000 minutes is 10,000 hours or about 1 1/2 years. But in real life even the fast disks can only write at about 200Mb/s (50MB/s), 15 times slower. So that theoretical 1.5 years is actually 22.5 years with a real disk. And that's only if you continuously write to the drive, rather than actually using it for something.
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