[Nottingham] re: FLASH vs HDD (Martin)

[Jim Moore]

I've run benchmarks myself over a few years (and destroyed no end of 
flash drives) with a view to reducing power consumption on thin clients 
(without going diskless) and found that on NTFS in particular, the 
number of write cycles per chunk of data exceeds nonjournaling 
filesystems by anywhere between 250-400%, depending on the size of the 
chunk and the number of chunks in the queue. While an ATA cache copes 
with this by holding smaller chunks until the cache is full then dumping 
the contents onto the drive proper, flash doesn't have this so it writes 
directly to the filesystem, which slows the whole thing down while at 
the same time wearing the hardware (given the quoted MTBF on flash is 
very low, it could work out a bit expensive if you cut that MTBF into a 
quarter by utilising a JFS).