On Tuesday, August 7, 2001, at 10:42 AM, Stainless Steel Rat wrote:
> * "Eric L. Strobel" <fyzycyst_at_home.com> on Tue, 07 Aug 2001
> | The key there is "What is the block size?" If it's some reasonable
> size (~
> | 1K) then I expect you'll never notice the loss of something smaller
> than one
> | percent of your memory. (unless, of course, something very important
> is
> | there...)
>
> Not quite. Flash blocks wear on write, not on read. When a write error
> occours, the control circuitry in the flash media itself will
> automagically
> switch to a different block, and mark the bad block as being bad. The
> OS
> never sees the error, and you never lose any data.
I'm not an expert in the field, but I thought I've read some comments
from Paul Guyot, who has been working extensively in the store area of
the Newton OS and I kinda of remember him mentioning that the built-in
drivers in the OS wouldn't be able to deal with those bad blocks, that
the only way to salvage the card would be to try to format it on a
Windows laptop with some specific utility program I don't remember.
This is all out of my memory, so don't quote me on this, but I thought
I've read some comments from Paul about that problem. Maybe he will
comment further when he gets back from vacation...
-Laurent.
-- ===================================================================== Laurent Daudelin Developer, Multifamily, ESO, Fannie Mae mailto:Laurent_Daudelin_at_fanniemae.com Washington, DC, USA ********************** Usual disclaimers apply ********************** "Heuristics are bug ridden by definition. If they didn't have bugs, then they'd be algorithms."-- This is the Newtontalk mailinglist - http://www.newtontalk.net To unsubscribe or manage: visit the above link or mailto:newtontalk-request_at_newtontalk.net?Subject=unsubscribe
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