On Fri, Mar 27, 2009 at 04:35:20PM +0100, Elena of Valhalla wrote: > 2009/3/27 Martin Dengler <mar...@martindengler.com>: > > It's a lot better not to re-format *at all* USB sticks one gets if one > > can help it: > > > > http://wiki.laptop.org/go/How_to_Damage_a_FLASH_Storage_Device > > http://thunk.org/tytso/blog/2009/02/20/aligning-filesystems-to-an-ssds-erase-block-size/ > > actually, the issues in these links seems to be mostly with > partitioning rather than plain formatting
They are certainly related, to the extent that re-partitioning usually implied re-formatting. But I took away a clear message that formatting is tricky in and of itself: "To damage such a device, all you have to do is reformat it with any of the usual Linux-based tools like fdisk, mkfs, and dd." "...if the filesystem layout is bad, every cluster write might "split" two pages, forcing the FTL to perform four internal I/O operations instead of one." ...from http://wiki.laptop.org/go/How_to_Damage_a_FLASH_Storage_Device, and: "Aligning your file system on an erase block boundary is critical on first generation SSD" ...from http://thunk.org/tytso/blog/2009/02/20/aligning-filesystems-to-an-ssds-erase-block-size/ > under e.g. linux a simple > mkfs.vfat /dev/sdb1 > shouldn't be more problematic than simply writing the same (small > AFAIK) amount of data. "Your second set of opportunities to mess up comes when you use "mkfs" to create the filesystem." It is significiantly more problematic according to those sources. Martin
pgpJX04xNlXYv.pgp
Description: PGP signature
_______________________________________________ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
