5 ms·

> 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 l

> 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.

anthk 4y ago
My old w98 machine had a 60 GB disk and for sure lasted far more than microSD's.
- BirAdam 4y ago
  That could be survivor bias.
  - anthk 4y ago
    No, the common usage.
- walrus01 4y ago
  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 $785 today.
  - anthk 4y ago
    W98 was used until the WXP SP2 era. Not so expensive if you had it by 2001.
- AshamedCaptain 4y ago
  If this is going to be a contest of throwing anecdotes around, I literally have _multiple_ Win98 VMs on a single 256GB microSD (which is like, 30$?). 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).
  - anthk 4y ago
    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.

anthk 4y ago

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

BirAdam 4y ago
That could be survivor bias.
- anthk 4y ago
  No, the common usage.
walrus01 4y ago
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 $785 today.
- anthk 4y ago
  W98 was used until the WXP SP2 era. Not so expensive if you had it by 2001.
AshamedCaptain 4y ago
If this is going to be a contest of throwing anecdotes around, I literally have _multiple_ Win98 VMs on a single 256GB microSD (which is like, 30$?). 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).
- anthk 4y ago
  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.