something I've been wondering about MicroSD cards

[skykiii]

Lately I've been watching a lot of hobbyist videos about retro computing, such as about adapters that let you use a MicroSD card as a hard drive for a Windows 98 machine, or this thing called the weeCee which is an entire vintage computer on a chip that uses MicroSD as its hard drive.

And I've seen people claim this is actually a bad thing, because apparently MicroSD or any solid state storage can only write data so many times or something... and because of that, things that would be necessary back then, like defragmentation, are actually bad because they make the drive die faster.

Okay, question: is that shit actually true or is it just a tech rumor?

Let me know. thanks.

 

[Vecr]

Yes, that's true, but how much write loads are you going to do on a Windows 98 computer? Yeah, if it's an old fluid dynamics software that's going to be running for weeks and writing all the time, or some old database software, it could be bad, but if it's a couple hours a month playing old games it's no problem. Don't buy the SD card off Amazon though, as there are a lot of fakes.

 

[Ass Monkey]

Yes, that's true, but how much write loads are you going to do on a Windows 98 computer?

It will do a ton of writes actually due to the swap file. You can disable it, but from what i remember Win98 does not like it disabled. It’s been years since I have played around in Win98 so maybe people have figured out a stable workaround??

 

[generic sauce]

Defragmenting flash based media is pointless because it doesn't have a read/write head to move around to find data.

 

[VargReallyDidNothingWrong]

And I've seen people claim this is actually a bad thing, because apparently MicroSD or any solid state storage can only write data so many times or something... and because of that, things that would be necessary back then, like defragmentation, are actually bad because they make the drive die faster.

All solid state drives have a limited amount of write/rewrite cycles they can handle before the storage begins to degrade and sectors start to die and require trimming. This has been known since SSD's started becoming a relatively common product.

That said the amount of cycles most SSD chips, including the ones in SD cards, can handle is pretty huge and your vintage Windows 3.1.1 box running a MicroSD as a hard drive will never use it up because on vintage computers your file sizes are in the megabytes at best, and you're not writing and rewriting terabytes of data a month

 

[skykiii]

Don't buy the SD card off Amazon though, as there are a lot of fakes.

i never buy those generic ones, I always get a branded one. Or have they started putting real brand names on fake cards?

It will do a ton of writes actually due to the swap file. You can disable it, but from what i remember Win98 does not like it disabled. It’s been years since I have played around in Win98 so maybe people have figured out a stable workaround??

The first idea that comes to my head is to just use that option that lets you set a minimum and maximum amount of space for the swap file, which I recall even back in the day a lot of people said its what you should do because apparently that thing's amorphous size slowed things down.... but I've also heard counter-arguments that you should leave it unlimited unless you have a very good reason to limit it.

 

[sasazuka]

I wouldn't buy SD cards from shady Amazon Marketplace sellers but there's an official SanDisk store right on Amazon (at least in Canada) that I've ordered SD cards off with no issues. Yeah, sure, maybe it costs a dollar or two more than buying SanDisk from other sellers but at least I know what I'm getting is actually SanDisk.

 

[Vecr]

i never buy those generic ones, I always get a branded one. Or have they started putting real brand names on fake cards?

They have. I don't know how prevalent it is, but it's not worth it unless this is a throwaway project.

 

[Another Char Clone]

i never buy those generic ones, I always get a branded one. Or have they started putting real brand names on fake cards?

They have. I don't know how prevalent it is, but it's not worth it unless this is a throwaway project.

There are fake ones selling as real brands. Use something like https://github.com/AltraMayor/f3 on Linux to check them.

 

[Gargamel]

If the computer is new enough, or the drive is small enough, you can usually use a SATA SSD with a SATA to IDE adapter. Any halfway decent one will handle a lot more wear and tear than an SD card, which is probably already good enough as it is.

If your system can't handle a 256GB (or whatever is the smallest good SSD these days) drive, you can work around that with a BIOS extension. Back in the day you could get a card that enabled large disks above whichever limit your system imposes. It was literally an ISA card with nothing but a PROM containing some code that overrides the BIOS and handles disks for it.

You can burn the XT-IDE firmware onto a PROM and stick it in the option ROM socket on a network card or something. That is effectively the same thing as the above.

As for wear leveling, you can limit the size of your partitions to less than the size of the drive. So you could have a 120GB system paritition on a 500GB drive and leave the rest unpartitioned, and if you ever managed to write more than 500GB of data you've still only written each block only once, so it's essentially new. Even with heavy virtual memory usage you'll probably never even touch 1% of the drive's rated lifetime TBW. This also applies to large SD cards.

If you're really concerned, you can pull the drive or card and stick it in a modern Linux computer and do fstrim to let the controller know which blocks are no longer in use.

 

[AmpleApricots]

You can disable swap files in win9x, but as others have said there is a good chance you will run into problems because a swapfile is assumed. What you should be able to do IIRC is to make a ramdisk with RAMDRIVE.SYS and then put the swapfile there. It is often pretty cheap and easy to load up old Win9x era systems with absurd levels of RAM. Yes this is braindead, but so is Win9x. I'm actually not sure if Win9x will accept a ramdisk as space for a swapfile.

If you are really worried, there's IDE DOM (Disk On Module) modules, they're little flash storage modules you can stick directly on IDE headers and will function as IDE harddrive. The advantage of these is that they come with robust flash cells and usually at small sizes (up to 1 to 4 GB is common, up to 32 GB exist, smallest are usually 128 MB) filesystems of old systems have no problems using. If Pin 20 of the IDE port is wired to 5V (usually it isn't, but as long as it is not on ground or missing, it is easy to wire up) it will take the power directly from there, making it a very clean solution which might be worth it if you are space constrained and don't want to use tons of cables and adapters. The next step is IDE to CF card adapters. There are "industrial grade" CF cards that have a ton of rewrites. These things are more expensive than your usual SD card, especially for the capacity you are getting but they deal with tons of rewrites by SSD unaware systems better. That all said this is overkill and a reasonably big SSD should be able to handle a ton of rewrites.

 

[Jump]

I wouldn't worry about it.
I have old Pi 1b's running on original SD cards and they are still working fine.
I think you had a much higher chance of a failure in 1998 running a Maxtor or Conner hard drive then you would on a name brand SD card today. And if your weecee has lots of ram Windows shouldn't even be hitting swap that much.

 

[Vecr]

I have old Pi 1b's running on original SD cards and they are still working fine.

I've had write-based failures on name brand cards. It's a thing. For playing games I'd do it, but for 24/7 use it might not be optimal. Make backups.

 

[xn--mck1c]

Defragmenting flash based media is pointless because it doesn't have a read/write head to move around to find data.

Technically true, but not the whole picture.
Flash memory still stores things in "blocks", and to rewrite any part of a block, the whole block needs to be erased and re-written.
That means there is benefit to packing files in a sensible manner, and maintenance by erasing blocks that are completely unused ahead of time.
This is usually called "TRIM" or "Optimize", and on Windows is found next to the other defrag options.
Some SSDs already do this at the firmware level by way of receiving a special command, or on an internal schedule.

 

[barrow greeter]

As far as SSDs are concerned, the quality name brand ones can endure dozens of GBs (way over average use) written per day for over a decade. So outside of individual units failing, the write durability is very good. People just stress out when they read that there is finite amount of write cycles inherent in the technology, unlike magnetic storage like hard drives, where the write cycles of the media are theoretically infinite, barring mechanical failure of the drive mechanism (which is almost always what takes out hard drives).

In most cases, you'll replace your SSD before your get anywhere near to the danger zone with wearing out the NAND cells.

 

[Shroom King]

In most cases, you'll replace your SSD before your get anywhere near to the danger zone with wearing out the NAND cells.

Speaking of NAND the internal memory on the Wii is 512 MB NAND. How many people have you heard of that had their Wii's internal memory fail? The optical drive will crap out before that.

 

[std::string]

That said the amount of cycles most SSD chips, including the ones in SD cards, can handle is pretty huge and your vintage Windows 3.1.1 box running a MicroSD as a hard drive will never use it up because on vintage computers your file sizes are in the megabytes at best, and you're not writing and rewriting terabytes of data a month

The main issue would be swap writing to the same small group of cells over and over again and burning them out.

I think all SSD drives have hardware-level wear leveling that automatically prevents this, but I'm not sure about SD cards.