Re: What about caching flash writes to extend the life of flash?
I think the manufacturers are working their spec sheets very carefully instead.
Seagate "Barracuda" flash drives for consumer upgrades are rated at total writes of 600x the capacity of the drive. Which is pretty good as long as you don't do video editing all day long, but spend your time reading El Reg instead -- meaning the disk is idle.
Enterprise drives are about 3x better write endurance, if my math is approximately correct (Nytro 1351 series, just to pick a product.)
The end user can also adopt these strategies: keep the drive less than half full; use big RAM as a buffer to reduce writing rate; sleep more often.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
