Thread: Safe longterm storage
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Old 10-15-2014, 04:13 PM   #36
j.p.s
Grand Sorcerer
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Posts: 5,796
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Join Date: Apr 2011
Device: pb360
Quote:
Originally Posted by murg View Post
Don't worry about it.

You'd have to overwrite the entire device every day for your entire lifetime, your kids entire lifetimes, and their kids entire life times to run into the write cycle limit.
Quote:
Originally Posted by j.p.s View Post
I'm pretty sure bad blocks would start to develop during the first month of overwriting the entire device once per day.
Quote:
Originally Posted by saoir View Post
It doesn't matter if they do. The software identifies those blocks dynamically and maps them to be avoided.
But it does matter.

The write cycle limit specifies the number of rewrites before some percentage of the total number of blocks is bad, not before any block is bad. So it becomes a problem to rewrite the entire device not only after grandchildren's lifetime, but well before the end of a year of daily rewriting the entire device.

Last year, I wrote a 16GBish disk image to a new blank "16GB" SD card. I booted from this card a couple of times and made some configuration changes that I could not figure how to back out, so I decided to just reimage the card. When I tried to do so, I got a "device full" error message before the copy was complete. So, not even a single complete rewrite of the entire device in that particular case.
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