The untold dangers of eMMC

[VirtualLarry]

It just hit me how BAD eMMC technology is.

Imagine, a PC, with a tiny SSD soldered to the motherboard. Only, there is no way to replace it, like a HDD or SSD can normally be replaced. Instead, you have to throw out the board or the PC altogether, when it eventually wears out. Which, given the smaller sizes of eMMC (32GB), is going to be sooner rather than later. (I burned through 9TB, 25% of the life of an OCZ Agility 30GB SSD, in a little over a month while running BOINC.)

Thinking about the tiny Zotac PicoPC led me to this revelation.

 

[postmortemIA]

so reads don't wear it our, right? just writes. minimize writes = problem solved.

 

[Deders]

For some reason I can't find the setting in Boinc that allows you to use a different disk, but yeah it was a shock to me when my 830's written bytes went up several TB in a month in a month. Thankfully that is only a small percentage of it's lifespan.

 

[dave_the_nerd]

The more you integrate into the mainboard, the cheaper you can build the things.

 

[VirtualLarry]

For some reason I can't find the setting in Boinc that allows you to use a different disk, but yeah it was a shock to me when my 830's written bytes went up several TB in a month in a month. Thankfully that is only a small percentage of it's lifespan.

When you first install BOINC, it asks you about the C colon \Program Files\BOINC and the C colon \ProgramData\BOINC directories. Change the drive letter on ProgramData to a different letter than C colon.

I'm not aware of any way to change this after installation, short of un-installing and re-installing BOINC.

Anyways, you can change the checkpoint interval, from 60 seconds, to something higher. I use 3600 seconds. That's once an hour, instead of once a minute. Of course, each WU downloaded and completed and uploaded still gets written to the drive, so if you use a project that burns through many small WUs, or downloads large WUs, it may still cause wear on your SSD even with that tweak.

 

[VirtualLarry]

The more you integrate into the mainboard, the cheaper you can build the things.

And sadly, the more disposable things become.

 

[taltamir]

by the time it wears out, the pc would have long been obsoleted and or died.
unless you are running a high activity database, then your SSD is the longest lived component in your system

 

[exar333]

And sadly, the more disposable things become.

I am inclined to agree.

 

[KingFatty]

But is this like an integrated sound card, so that if the motherboard's sound card breaks you can still go and get a discrete sound card? I'm wondering if you could similarly go buy a discrete SSD and install it, and just ignore/disable any integrated SSD(s) that break?

As an analogy, when people get kidney transplants, the new kidney is added as a 3rd (or 4th etc.) in the stomach area somewhere, and the original kidney(s) are left in place even though they may not be helpful anymore.

 

[Compman55]

This is why **WE** as consumers have to just say NO. Hold back from the temptation, and refuse to buy stuff like that.

Apple is one compny that is going to continue integrating more and more, however this is no stopping it. Its nice to have small, light, sleek devices, but I will pass when better larger options are avail.