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Comment by hoppp | Hacker News Reader

I thought about this a few times but the flash storage is a bit sketchy for running a database, I am worried it can die. Tho android does have sqlite built in and works fine.

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Any storage device can die, that's why you have a robust backup system, right? Right...? :)

But the flash storage in a phone is going to be the eMMC variety which typically means a proper controller and TLC NAND. Not as robust probably as a "proper" SSD/NVME, but a lot more durable than most micro SD cards. And it'll have health indicators.

If your phone supports being USB host you can try USB splitter dongle and attach external SSD drive to it.

Also if your phone has SD card slot you can try "industrial" SD cards. They are small in capacity but ideal for write load.

Just because it's a database doesn't mean it does more write cycles on the flash cells than storing regular files would cause it to. Anytime you change something, it writes either a file, or does an update/insert query which causes a file write. In both cases you've written a few bytes to disk, doesn't really matter what the underlying system is (not majorly anyway, surely one solution will turn out to be some % better than another and cause the average phone's storage chip to last 30 years instead of 40 under some defined typical usage pattern)

You can also just insert an SD card to do the write-heavy operations and swap it out when it wears out (you make backups, right? :D)

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