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Comment by daneel_w | Hacker News Reader

I don't buy it, because it contradicts the very nature of flash storage. Unless you used your IDE HDDs as piñatas, that is. But the problems specific to SD/microSD and USB flash drives are more than limited longevity. The underlying SDIO protocol/interface of this storage type has several shortcomings making it awful for general operating system use entailing frequent intermixed writes and reads, including bringing the whole storage (and with it the OS) to a complete read-blocked freeze during extended and small rapid writes.

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> I don't buy it, because it contradicts the very nature of flash storage.

No, it really doesn't. Besides, both capacities _and_ performance have increased a lot since the top-of-the-line IDE HDDs. It's easy enough to see that e.g. a user of a Steam Deck probably writes daily a couple orders of magnitude more to a microSD than even a heavy a Windows 98 user did to its HDD. Even the writes caused by desfragmenting your average era HDD daily is practically peanuts to a TB microSD, but it was definitely not peanuts to the HDD itself.

> The underlying SDIO protocol/interface of this storage type has several shortcomings making it awful for general operating system use entailing frequent intermixed writes and reads

We are comparing this to IDE. Not NVME on top of PCIe.

TL;DR I have a pile of broken microSD hards, but I also have a larger pile of broken old HDDs.

My old w98 machine had a 60 GB disk and for sure lasted far more than microSD's.

If this is going to be a contest of throwing anecdotes around, I literally have _multiple_ Win98 VMs on a single 256GB microSD (which is like, 30$?). And so do a lot of people who are in the target audience of TFA, whom boot their retro hardware from microSDs since it is definitely faster and even more reliable than era-accurate HDDs. And just plain more convenient; you can backup the entire HDD by copying the SD around in a fraction of the time it would take you to clone the HDD.

It just makes sense that the microSD would last longer. Even if you assume that it was the worst of the worst of flash memory and each cell would only last 100 times, that still amounts to 20TB of lifetime writes to the microSD. Windows would even use ridiculously large size cluster sizes on a 60GiB drive, so write amplification would be of little concern. You could install Windows 98 over and over continuously as max as allowed by the HDD speed (say 1hr per installation) for a decade and you would still have writes to spare. Paper envelope calculation caveat, but normally flash memory will have at least one order of magnitude more cycles.

Let's remember that 90s and early 00s HDDs are not remembered for their longevity, either (search for click of death).

An Amiga 2000 booting from MicroSD is not the same as booting Windows 98.

>Let's remember that 90s and early 00s HDDs are not remembered for their longevity, either (search for click of death).

My ~2002 drive was reliable enough. What it broke was a motherboard capacitor.

60GB in a windows 98 machine is honestly huge in an era when a 20GB IBM HDD sold for $440 in 1998-1999 pre inflation currency. Equivalent to about $785 today.

W98 was used until the WXP SP2 era. Not so expensive if you had it by 2001.

That could be survivor bias.

No, the common usage.

Person 1: "Here is my lived experience."

Person 2: "I don't buy it."

Internet in a nutshell.

I think this often comes up when one person is talking about personal experience, and another person is talking about general advice.

One person's anecdote does not necessarily prove any larger point. They might have gotten (un)lucky, live or work in a particular environment/context that doesn't apply generally, etc.

On the other hand, dismissing someone's anecdote because you have some Larger Point axe to grind is also a bit crap (:

This isn't my experience.

You must be using a different Internet

I think part of it has to do with the workloads you're using.

If you're using it as a disc replacement for, say, a 286/386, it comes from an era where disc performance was far worse, so the software is usually not going to hit the disc gratuitiously.

Also, dealing with an adapter that's single-threaded and taps out at 25Mbps isn't a big deal when you're dealing with an environment with primitive cooperative multitasking (i. e. DOS/Win3) and attached via a bus that tops out at half that.

Now, it could be an issue in later systems-- something like a late 486 or beyond, where it has a local-bus/VL-bus/PCI disc controller and might be used with Linux or Windows NT might work poorly with those adapters, but then you're probably able to use a commercial PATA or SATA+adaptor SSD.

Tell that to the original Raspberry Pi's floating around that are old enough to be enrolled in high school.

That's not been my experience with the original Pis. We ended up mounting cards as read only because they wouldn't last otherwise. Syslog and various other processes, even with light IO would render the cards useless after a month or two.

Were they high-endurance SD cards? In my experience, people usually aren't aware there is a difference between standard and high-endurance SD cards. The former should last years on a light I/O raspberry pi workload.

Okay, so don't use 90% of SD cards.

Also: a lot of OS distributions aimed at SBCs with microSD storage forgetting to set noatime/relatime on their file systems, to avoid thousands upon thousands of writes for access time updates whenever files are read. It's only just recently that OS vendors finally woke up and realized what was going on.

relatime is default option since forever. (certainly since before rpi was even a thing)

https://elixir.bootlin.com/linux/v2.6.30/source/fs/namespace... (some random old kernel)

That's good info and news to me. "relatime" is unfortunately a silent killer as well, albeit nowhere near as intense as "strictatime".

On their original SD card? Probably not, especially on the earlier raspi models.

"Hey, original Raspberry Pi, you have no bulk flash storage on board so I don't know why this guy is trying to get you into unrelated discussion about durability of bulk flash storage in the first place!"

Here, I told it.

Also they are "just" 11 years old so you've managed to be wrong on everything you said somehow..

I have, on numerous occasions. It's one of the reasons why general desktop use on them can be so infuriating.

I have old raspis, the SD card failed.

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