continuing disk crash issue

[Liam Proven]

On Mon, 30 Jun 2025 at 15:18, Owen Thomas <owen.paul.thomas at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Anyway these observations might provide further stimulation to this discussion and that might inform me yet again.

This may be informative:

https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/microsd-cards/microsd-card-testing-database-exposes-fakes-charts-performance-and-endurance-200-cards-tested-51-to-destruction-8-machines-running-70-card-readers-wrote-18-petabytes-for-testing

As a general guideline:

Buy branded stuff if the contents matter to you. Do not go looking for
cheap media. Cheap is bad.

Secondly, for flash storage, the way it writes is deeply complicated.
But what you want to do is over-provision. Have lots more space than
you need. Always have empty space. Ideally lots of it.

For spinning media it was a good guideline to never run it over 75%
full. After that, it fragments fast, and performance falls off a
cliff.

For flash media, invert that. Try to keep it 75% empty. It's pretty
cheap. Buy bigger than you need. Leave some of it unpartitioned if you
can, because then, the on-disk computer has more freedom to move stuff
around to try to comply with what you ask.

A spinning hard disk is a big block of storage. Your computer does the
hard work of tracking and assigning allocation.

This is why disks on the other end of a network cable are much safer:
your computer does not do that. It says to the server "store this" and
the server does the work.

Flash media are sort of like little storage servers in your computer.
They are their own separate little computers managing storage and
lying to your computer that it's able to see blocks and rewrite them
on demand. It can't. It's a lie. Flash doesn't work like that.

So make that tiny onboard computer happy: give it loads of space to
work with so it doesn't have to work hard.

Because when it does have to work hard, the medium dies.


-- 
Liam Proven ~ Profile: https://about.me/liamproven
Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ~ gMail/gTalk/FB: lproven at gmail.com
Twitter/LinkedIn: lproven ~ Skype: liamproven
IoM: (+44) 7624 227612: UK: (+44) 7939-087884
Czech [+ WhatsApp/Telegram/Signal]: (+420) 702-829-053