Re: Time to abandon large mechanical hard drives?

From	Charles Lindsey <chl@clerew.man.ac.uk>
Newsgroups	comp.os.linux.embedded
Subject	Re: Time to abandon large mechanical hard drives?
Date	2018-07-16 11:20 +0100
Message-ID	<fr39r1Frc2U1@mid.individual.net> (permalink)
References	<Q9c7w.764822$KL.491778@fx19.am4> <nlo9tj$g5v$1@dont-email.me> <nlvi3l$g5d$1@dont-email.me>

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On 11/07/16 08:33, David Brown wrote:
> On 08/07/16 15:29, Alexander Suvorov wrote:

> That only applies to old, small or very low-end SSD's.  If you have a
> mid-range consumer SSD with 200GB+ of size, there is no realistic
> workload that could ever come close to wearing it out.

Well I have a box controlling the heating in our Church. Its SSD is 
actually a USB stick (about 10 years old now), but the stuff on it 
changes rarely (e.g. when I upgrade the software) and I carefully chose 
a web server (Appweb) that deliberately keeps its state information in 
RAM. So I hope the box will continue to run for many years (though 
things might break for other reasons in Jan. 2038).

BUT there are a few kilobytes of data that are changing all the time 
(e.g. a record of temperature changes over the last month, and the 
schedule of upcoming heating requirements). I did not want to trust 
Flash memory for that, so I installed a 128 kB EEPROM (which claimed it 
could be overwritten a million times before wearing out).

Was this a good move? Recently, I observed a lot of random read failures 
(which usually corrected themselves when you re-read the same address). 
Now it may be due to the hot weather (the room housing the box has 
regularly been at 30 degrees Celcius over this last month - maybe it 
will be OK when the weather gets cooler).

Should I be worried? Data is written to it a byte at a time, whenever 
the temperature in one of the 4 zones changes by 0.1 degree. It is not 
clear whether, behind the scenes, it overwrites a full 12b-byte block 
when you try to overwrite a single byte.

What alternative options do I have?

-- 
Charles H. Lindsey ---------At my New Home, still doing my own 
thing-----------
Tel: +44 161 488 1845                         Web: 
http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~chl
Email: chl@clerew.man.ac.uk      Snail: 40 SK8 5BF, U.K.
PGP: 2C15F1A9      Fingerprint: 73 6D C2 51 93 A0 01 E7 65 E8 64 7E 14 
A4 AB A5

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Time to abandon large mechanical hard drives? 7 <email_at_www_at_enemygadgets_dot_com@enemygadgets.com> - 2014-11-07 23:00 +0000
  Re: Time to abandon large mechanical hard drives? David Brown <david.brown@hesbynett.no> - 2014-11-08 13:39 +0100
    Re: Time to abandon large mechanical hard drives? 7 <email_at_www_at_enemygadgets_dot_com@enemygadgets.com> - 2014-11-08 20:00 +0000
      Re: Time to abandon large mechanical hard drives? 	flatfish+++ <phlatphish@yahoo.com> - 2014-11-08 15:07 -0500
        Re: Time to abandon large mechanical hard drives? 7 <email_at_www_at_enemygadgets_dot_com@enemygadgets.com> - 2014-11-08 20:14 +0000
    Re: Time to abandon large mechanical hard drives? JEDIDIAH <jedi@nomad.mishnet> - 2014-11-08 19:34 -0600
      Re: Time to abandon large mechanical hard drives? 7 <email_at_www_at_enemygadgets_dot_com@enemygadgets.com> - 2014-11-10 00:36 +0000
  Re: Time to abandon large mechanical hard drives? Desk Rabbit <me@example.com> - 2014-11-11 09:16 +0000
    Re: Time to abandon large mechanical hard drives? Silver Slimer <slvrslmr@lv.c> - 2014-11-11 08:49 -0500
      Re: Time to abandon large mechanical hard drives? 	flatfish+++ <phlatphish@yahoo.com> - 2014-11-11 08:51 -0500
        Re: Time to abandon large mechanical hard drives? Silver Slimer <slvrslmr@lv.c> - 2014-11-11 09:09 -0500
          Re: Time to abandon large mechanical hard drives? 	flatfish+++ <phlatphish@yahoo.com> - 2014-11-11 09:46 -0500
            Re: Time to abandon large mechanical hard drives? Silver Slimer <slvrslmr@lv.c> - 2014-11-11 10:30 -0500
              Re: Time to abandon large mechanical hard drives? 	flatfish+++ <phlatphish@yahoo.com> - 2014-11-11 10:49 -0500
                Re: Time to abandon large mechanical hard drives? "Ezekiel" <zeke@nosuchemail.com> - 2014-11-11 11:04 -0500
                Re: Time to abandon large mechanical hard drives? 	flatfish+++ <phlatphish@yahoo.com> - 2014-11-11 11:37 -0500
                Re: Time to abandon large mechanical hard drives? Silver Slimer <slvrslmr@lv.c> - 2014-11-11 11:46 -0500
                Re: Time to abandon large mechanical hard drives? 	flatfish+++ <phlatphish@yahoo.com> - 2014-11-11 12:24 -0500
                Re: Time to abandon large mechanical hard drives? Silver Slimer <slvrslmr@lv.c> - 2014-11-11 12:47 -0500
                Re: Time to abandon large mechanical hard drives? Silver Slimer <slvrslmr@lv.c> - 2014-11-11 11:14 -0500
                Re: Time to abandon large mechanical hard drives? 	flatfish+++ <phlatphish@yahoo.com> - 2014-11-11 11:59 -0500
                Re: Time to abandon large mechanical hard drives? Silver Slimer <slvrslmr@lv.c> - 2014-11-11 12:05 -0500
      Re: Time to abandon large mechanical hard drives? "Ezekiel" <zeke@nosuchemail.com> - 2014-11-11 09:29 -0500
        Re: Time to abandon large mechanical hard drives? 	flatfish+++ <phlatphish@yahoo.com> - 2014-11-11 09:48 -0500
          Re: Time to abandon large mechanical hard drives? Kristof Provost <kristof@codepro.be> - 2014-11-20 14:46 +0000
        Re: Time to abandon large mechanical hard drives? Silver Slimer <slvrslmr@lv.c> - 2014-11-11 10:27 -0500
    Re: Time to abandon large mechanical hard drives? 7 <email_at_www_at_enemygadgets_dot_com@enemygadgets.com> - 2014-11-23 00:38 +0000
      Re: Time to abandon large mechanical hard drives? Sir Slimer <slvrslmr@lv.c> - 2014-11-22 22:12 -0500
        Re: Time to abandon large mechanical hard drives? Snit <usenet@gallopinginsanity.com> - 2014-11-22 20:29 -0700
          Re: Time to abandon large mechanical hard drives? Sir Slimer <slvrslmr@lv.c> - 2014-11-22 22:45 -0500
            Re: Time to abandon large mechanical hard drives? Snit <usenet@gallopinginsanity.com> - 2014-11-22 20:49 -0700
              Re: Time to abandon large mechanical hard drives? Sir Slimer <slvrslmr@lv.c> - 2014-11-22 23:32 -0500
        Re: Time to abandon large mechanical hard drives? 7 <email_at_www_at_enemygadgets_dot_com@enemygadgets.com> - 2014-11-23 19:41 +0000
  Time to abandon large mechanical hard drives? Alexander Suvorov <axr.suvorov@yandex.ru> - 2016-07-08 16:29 +0300
    Re: Time to abandon large mechanical hard drives? jeffj@panix.com (Jeff Jonas) - 2016-07-10 04:47 -0400
      Re: Time to abandon large mechanical hard drives? David Brown <david.brown@hesbynett.no> - 2016-07-11 09:31 +0200
    Re: Time to abandon large mechanical hard drives? David Brown <david.brown@hesbynett.no> - 2016-07-11 09:33 +0200
      Re: Time to abandon large mechanical hard drives? Charles Lindsey <chl@clerew.man.ac.uk> - 2018-07-16 11:20 +0100

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