cf wear levelling strategy

Apparently, this is for the newest CF only, have not tried any yet.

"SanDisk is the only company that offers a complete line of Industrial Grade (IG) Flash memory cards"

Industrial grade - 2,000,000 cycles New standard grade - 300,000 cycles Old standard grade - 100,000 cycles

For most existing CF: old standard grade with 1000 clusters (est.).

Writing 1 byte per second = 100,000 * 1000 / 86400 = 11500 days MTBF Writing 1M per second = 100,000 / 86400 = 11.5 days MTBF

Details at:

PS: This is assuming that the sector translation table is stored in EEPROM, which has a typical life time of 1,000,000. So, the sector translation table will wear out long before the actual sectors.

i.e.: 1,000,000 / 86400 = 115 days MTBF

In conclusion: Don't bet on wear leveling. Mount CF read-only.

Updated details at:

Did they forget the FAT updates in the calculations ? I suppose this always is a "one sector rewrite" and thus a "worst case" operation. As there usually are two copies of the FAT the worst case is worse by factor three. Of course the OS caching the FAT will help a lot, but results in increased power fail problems.

Is there any word about the infamous power off problem in the docs ?

-Michael