Quote:
Originally Posted by RWebb
wear-levelling?
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On any computer disk, some files almost never get re-written (program files, shared libraries etc) whereas log files, temporary files, browser cache etc get written all the time.
On a "real" disk, the logical sectors that got written would actually always be the same physical sectors (unless they went bad during use and were re-mapped to a sector from the spare list by the drive itself).
"Wear levelling" is how flash drives transparently shuffle writes around so that constant writing to the same logical sector (as far as the OS/user is concern) actually gets distributed over the entire writeable area, so every part of the drive gets somewhere close to those 10,000 writes before it dies of old age and writes start to fail.
This means that you get a lot more use out of the flash drive - it lasts a lot longer.
USB thumb drives probably don't do wear-levelling. Never bothered to check. If they do, they probably don't do a very good job. Not an issue unless you write to it all the time.
SSD (Solid State Disk) drives intended to replace spinning disk in computer definitely do do (heh, I said "do do"
) wear levelling.