How many writing cycles on the nonvolatile memory of a cRIO?

[alexislg]

Hey,

I was wondering if we can write infinitely on the nonvolatile memory of the cRIO. I know that this memory is made of flash memory and that this kind of memory only allows a few millions of writing cycles.

In the application I'm working on, I plan to write 1 date every 10 second in a TDMS file. Can I do it or do I need to use a RAM buffer before copying to the TDMS file ?

[Mathieu_P.]

Hello alexislg,

It is hard to tell how many cycles you can do on that kind of memory. Each cell's life will heavily depend on wear leveling, the size of the drive, the amount of static data that is in the drive, etc. Depending on your cRIO model, the flash component may also change.

If you want some advises about this topic, please look at those documentations:

Understanding and Extending the Life of my Solid-State Drive

Best Practices for Target File IO with LabVIEW Real-Time

Regards,

[alexislg]

Thank you. It was exactly what I was waiting for. Now I knowthat in order to optimize the lifetime, I need to write chunks of 8192 Bytes.

Now I wonder if I write a 8kB file, then erase it and then repeat this operation again and again, will it use always the same EEPROM cell or will it use different cell at each writing?

[Mathieu_P.]

Hello,

I think that the flash memory has a wear leveling algorithm, so successive operations will use different sectors off the flash memory. So if you don't use a loop that continuously write data on the same file during months, you shouldn't have problems .

Regards,