[Soekris] "Squashed" versions of FreeBSD

[Brian W. Antoine]

> I may be wrong, but I didn't think the failure mode would be
> a "sudden and unexpected" downtime. I had assumed I'd start to
> see read/write errors like you see when a HDD slowly gets
> bad sectors. However, rethinking that, I'm not sure what to
> expect.

It depends on the filesystem.  The Flash FileSystem might be smart
enough to remap blocks on the fly when a read-after-write validation
fails, or it might simply be erasing and rewriting the same block
until it fails.  In that case you'll either loose a file or your
filesystem, depending on whether it was a data or inode block that
went bad.

Those cells can only be written to zero just so many times.  These
days it's a much larger number of times, but the limit still exists.