Intel Stomps Into Flash Memory

jcatcw writes "Intel's first NAND flash memory product, the Z-U130 Value Solid-State Drive, is a challenge to other hardware vendors. Intel claims read rates of 28 MB/sec, write speeds of 20 MB/sec., and capacity of 1GB to 8GB, which is much smaller than products from SanDisk. 'But Intel also touts extreme reliability numbers, saying the Z-U130 has an average mean time between failure of 5 million hours compared with SanDisk, which touts an MTBF of 2 million hours.'"

Comments

MTBF

[Eternauta3k]

'But Intel also touts extreme reliability numbers, saying the Z-U130 has an average mean time between failure of 5 million hours compared with SanDisk, which touts an MTBF of 2 million hours.'"

Is this hours of use or "real time" hours? I don't know about other people but my pendrives spend most of their time disconnected.

Re:Wear leveling in hardware

[EmbeddedJanitor]

The cards with internal controllers do something like you say and you can thead the SD or SmartMedia specs for details. They manage a "free pool" primarily as a way to address bad blocks, but this also provides a degree of wear levelling.

Putting a FAT partition onto such a device, or into a file via loop mounting, only gives you wear levelling. It does not buy you integrity. If you eject a FAT file system before mounting it then you are likely to damage the file system (potentially killing all the files in the partition). This might be correctable via a fschk.

Proper flash file systems are designed to be safe from bad unmounts. THese tend to be log structured (eg. YAFFS and JFFS2). Sure, you might lose the data that was in flight, but you should not lose other files. That's why most embedded systems don't use FAT for critical files and only use it where FAT-ness is important (eg. data transfer to a PC).