00:31 <geky[m]> Oh I never knew that were variable at some point. I believe they're fixed at 512 to be compatible with spinny disks, where sectors are always 512 bytes

00:32 <geky[m]> Internally they usually have much larger flash blocks, and I think there's extra SDIO commands to query for that, but the FTL layer hides this

00:34 <geky[m]> I think for some cards it's possible to query/erase/prog the underlying flash blocks directly, which may be more efficient if the fs already targets flash, but I don't know how universal those commands will be

00:36 <M9names[m]> If we're talking spinny disks, sectors definitely aren't always 512 - see "advanced format" on Wikipedia

00:37 <geky[m]> Oh huh, I stand corrected

00:41 <geky[m]> Looks like most 4K sector spinny disks also emulate 512 byte sectors for compatibility, which is a bit funny

07:22 <AlexandervanSaas> Noob question: is flash erase size and page size the same thing?

07:23 <K900> Not always

07:23 <K900> Some flash chips have a different erase size and write size

07:46 <geky[m]> My understanding is the page size is just the size of internal registers/buses. So it can be useful to optimize around, but is less important than the minimal program size/erase size. On NOR flash the minimal prog size is usually 1 byte, but programming 1 byte vs 256 bytes take roughly the same amount of time. Erase (setting the flash to 0xffs before programming) is usually much chonkier at around ~4KiB.

09:32 <diondokter[m]> <AlexandervanSaas> "Noob question: is flash erase..." <- As far as sequential-storage is concerned, yes