Generally speaking, Flash drive wear and tear is always brought up (SSD and USB) However, I haven't seen it.
I have personally found that cheap USB Flash drives for example go faulty and simply do not get recognised well before you actually see wear and tear.
Also, newer drives use technologies that randomise the locations of writes. I suppose, lets say you have a 100 GB drive and fill it up with 99.5 GB's, then you keep using .5 GB over and over again, you can reach the limit, but again, I use SSDs and USB sticks on a daily basis for very heavy use (over the past few years) and generally speaking, the drives die of general failures well before you see this as a problem.
No Experience with alternative File Systems, However I personally wouldn't bother... Use a mature file system and if it fails within a usable time, take it back under warranty. (if in the UK, up to ~6 years under the sale of goods act as you can say it was designed with a fault and not fit for the purpose of storing data... I am not a lawyer, but I took a laptop back 4 years after buying for a similar reason).
Also, for Windows just maybe worth a look in, I remember seeing a product from Diskeeper, that looks interesting - meant to optimise and extend the life of SSD disks, but I am wondering if it is needed and found several articles doubting it (only linked to one) and goes in to detail about wear and tear. Also, I can not longer see the product on their website, so it must of either been scrapped or built into a different edition.
If I remember correctly it's 4.1MiB (1,048,576 bytes*4.1 = 4,299,161.6 bytes).
Best Answer
mkfs.vfat
, if you limit it to one FAT (-f 1
) and 16 root directory entries (-r 16
), still insists on a minimum of 33792 bytes (66 sectors × 512 bytes), although it uses only 10 sectors for the filesystem (56 sectors remain for data).The filesystem remains mountable if you truncate it to 10 sectors, although attempting to write to such a truncated fs will result in the filesystem driver complaining.
You might have some luck with adjusting the filesystem structures with a hex editor, to properly shrink it to around 11 sectors...