Re: [gentoo-user] Gentoo on Thumbdrive

[Neil Bothwick <neil@digimed.co.uk>]

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 1313 bytes --]

On Sat, 3 Sep 2005 14:45:23 -0300, Norberto Bensa wrote:

> > more like three months if you put a frequently written directory,
> > like /tmp or /var/log, on a flash device. 
> 
> You can use UNIONFS for those ;)

That makes it less portable, but it is a solution.

> Anyway, unless we're talking about different technologies, one of my
> USB drives is working fine and it is more than a year old. And I've
> used it like crazy (both read _and_ writes.)

Flash memory has a definite write limit (no read lmiit AFAIK). It's
around 100,000 writes PER CELL. So if you use it as a normal filesystem,
writing and deleting files, as it was intended to be used, you won't
have much of a problem. Each write is likely to be to a different cell.
but if you have something that continually writes to the same place,
you'll soon kill it.

Read the recent thread on slow usb storage transfers, for an extreme
example, the way the latest kernels update the FAT for each block
write when a drive is mounted sync. Until I read this, I thought I'd
been unlucky when a Crucial 1GB drive died after only a few months use.
It turns out that repeatedly copying large files to the drive killed the
area containing the FAT.


-- 
Neil Bothwick

I don't suffer from insanity. I enjoy every minute of it.

[-- Attachment #2: Type: application/pgp-signature, Size: 189 bytes --]