On Fri, 2008-01-11 at 15:27 -0500, Ritesh Kumar wrote: > On Jan 11, 2008 3:00 PM, Alan McKinnon <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > wrote: > On Friday 11 January 2008, Anthony E. Caudel wrote: > > 2nd question: I must be dense on this one so someone help me > out. > > Since a USB stick is seen as a hard drive, why can't I do a > standard > > install to it? Is it because until lately they haven't been > large > > enough? I'm thinking of using an 8GB one. > > > There's a few reasons: > > 1. The memory used on those devices has a limited life - about > 100,000 > writes for the good ones and maybe 10,000 for the bad ones. > With a > standard install, frequent writes are the norm (think cache > and other > similar things). This usually ends up at the same spot on the > disk, > meaning your new install will last about a month if you are > lucky. > There are ways around this, for instance how a LiveCD does > things. > > You are right about the re-write life of flash media. However, there > are filesystems which can help by not writing to the same location in > the flash media again and again. I recall JFFS2 being a such flash > filesystem which is available for linux. > >
AFAIK JFFS2 and such alike are of no use on standard USB-sticks because they have their own system of wear levelling[1] and hide the actual layout from the OS. They are only useful on embedded systems and stuff like that where there is no such abstraction layer in firmware. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wear_levelling >
signature.asc
Description: This is a digitally signed message part
