Estimating flash life by reading EC (Erase Counters)

[Richard Weinberger]

On Mon, Apr 21, 2014 at 9:41 PM, David Yat Sin <jd.yatsin at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi,
> My goal is to be able to estimate the flash drive life in a production
> environment, so if there is a better/easier way of achieving this,
> please let me know.
>
> I have a small embedded device using NAND than runs UBIFS for the user
> partition. Our application constantly writes to log files, the log
> files are appended and gzip'ed, so it is hard to determine how much
> data is actually written to disk.
>
> I am hoping to do this by:
>
> 1. Read the EC (Erase Count) headers for each page on the partition
> 2. Let my system run for several days/weeks/months
> 3. Read the EC headers again
> 4. Then extrapolate drive life expectancy by comparing number of erase
> counts with the NAND endurance.
>
> Is there a utility that I could use to read the Erase Counters on a
> UBIFS partition?

IIRC ubinfo can tell you the value of the highest EC.

-- 
Thanks,
//richard