On Thu, September 30, 2010 11:01 pm, Delio M. DeMoura wrote:
> I find that USB drives usually fail at the USB connector. The flash memory
> itself almost never fails.

Wish it were so.  You can read online how some people formatted their USB
flash stick using the Ext3 filesystem, and the flash stick failed very
soon afterward due to the journal for the filesystem overwriting the same
section of the flash memory too many times.

I had a customer that used Ext3 on a CF card used for an embedded computer
against my recommendation, and the CF card failed within a few months of
very light use.  Probably for the same reason.

Flash memory has improved as to how many writes it can tolerate, but it's
hard to know when you buy one whether you get a version that can tolerate
a higher number of overwrites.

> I have a couple of laptops with SSD's in them and beat them up pretty
> good.
> So far so good.

For USB flash and CF cards I recommend using the ext2 filesystem because
it's unjournaled.  I've yet to have a CF card using ext2 fail, and I've
run some of them for 5 to 7 years.

LogFS is also a new filesystem that seems to be meant for USB and CF
cards, but it's not considered stable yet.  I haven't tested it yet, but
I'm looking forward to trying it out when it's a little more mature so
that other machines can read it.

  -- Chris

--

Chris Knadle
[email protected]

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