swaaye wrote:

Hey has anyone here managed to wear out a CF card? Supposedly they do wear leveling but I am suspicious about it. I assume wear failure would manifest as bad sectors.

Somewhat with osx tiger and that was almost daily use for a few months. The controller on most CF cards has wear leaving to help extend cell life and the older production process on some cards helps compared to the newer ones.

swaaye wrote:

Hey has anyone here managed to wear out a CF card? Supposedly they do wear leveling but I am suspicious about it. I assume wear failure would manifest as bad sectors.

This is why i went with Industrial type grade SD cards. These sport SLC type NAND which has much more endurance than normal MLC based cards. For DOS environment these cards will last for a life, with a normal day usage.

With this i can have Windows 98 on a different card to enjoy Windows 98 games, by just swapping cards.

I love how you can make your system so silent. Even at night i struggle to hear any noise from my 386 DX 40 system. I think i won't consider using a hard drive ever again on these vintage systems.

We had build an industrial pc without any moving part and used a sandisk extreme iv 16gb card.
The card ran in windows xp embedded and was used to store several recepies for the production process.
The card lastest for half a year until the machine gave up on us locking up etc, they ditched it for a pentium 4 with an old 40gb hdd still running to this day.
The industrial pc was used for other purposes and the card they gave them to me, i checked it and there are about 10 spots with non readable sectors and locks up the whole pc when trying to read just like an ordineary bad sector does.

Sometimes a wear on the cf sector can cause a whole failing card entirebly inaccesable and to report back perhaps only a small memory amount like 10 mb instead of a 4 or 8 gb card, then it is fubar or snafu.
I do not think cf really does wear leveling, maybe ssd's do.

That's interesting...

At work we do a lot of photography. They shoot hundreds of photos each day to SD and CF cards. They edit the photos directly on the cards too. I think I've only seen one card fail in years!

SSDs today have quite elaborate wear management. I really don't worry about longevity with them. If they fail it seems to be defects not wear.

JaNoZ wrote:

We had build an industrial pc without any moving part and used a sandisk extreme iv 16gb card. The card ran in windows xp embedd […]
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We had build an industrial pc without any moving part and used a sandisk extreme iv 16gb card.
The card ran in windows xp embedded and was used to store several recepies for the production process.
The card lastest for half a year until the machine gave up on us locking up etc, they ditched it for a pentium 4 with an old 40gb hdd still running to this day.
The industrial pc was used for other purposes and the card they gave them to me, i checked it and there are about 10 spots with non readable sectors and locks up the whole pc when trying to read just like an ordineary bad sector does.

Did you configure a swap file for XP on the SD card? I suppose that would kill the card rapidly, maybe depending on the amount of RAM.

Got the card from work, ended up being an 8GB Transcend CF160 Industrial, 486 still did the same thing as before but disk manager in XP picked it up as a fixed disk not removable as before... hmm lets have another go.

Chucked it back in the 486 and rather than letting post auto detect each time, I went into bios, IDE scan and that's when I saw it! It’s trying to use normal not LBA! Stupid thing even though it picks up it up as 8GB correctly and the manual quite clearly says 500MB is the max in normal. I think the motherboard needs to read its own manual! Sure enough it worked fine after that 😀

Then I thought if I can trick the computer. Now it’s all set up in bios correctly and locked in I swapped it for a sandisk, and it still worked! Fdisk can see everything and correctly partition it at last
I know I tried setting it manually before without joy, it’s as if I needed a CF card in fixed disk mode to set bios correctly, but once that’s done I can swap it with any old CF card that’s the same size.
The sandisks are now all set up, the Transcend is put somewhere safe, I’ve got 99% of all my games loaded and haven’t noticed any speed issues, the only writing I’ll do is savegames so should last longer than me in theory.