On Thu, Mar 26, 2009 at 9:13 PM, Edwin Lee <[email protected]>wrote:
> > Hi all, > > It seems like my portable 2.5" hdd has died... now it makes a spinning > noise for after i plug it in, and stops after a while, and i can never > detect it anymore... :( > > Fortunately i had the more important stuffs copied out... > > Anyway, was wondering if it is because i have just started running a > VirtualBox image (need to bring Ubuntu around with me) directly out of it - > as compared to copying it to internal hdd before running? Would the constant > heavy usage have contributed to this? (Though i have to say, it's not very > new hdd, almost 5 years old.) > > Also, since i'll need to get a replacement, was also wondering if it would > be a better idea to get a couple of high capacity USB flash drives instead? > Would it be more reliable? (i believe flash drives do have read/write > limit/lifespan as well.) > > Or is it just a bad practice to run applications off a USB device in the > first place? > USB is just the interface. The type of underlying device is what matters. So apart from the fact that the USB interface is slow, using a 2.5" external hard drive for hosting VirtualBox images should be the same as using the local hard drive (provided both are HDDs with similar characteristics - same rpm, both run the same filesystem, etc). In fact this article suggests that the external USB option is better because you effectively increase the total I/O bandwidth to your disks by having 2 of them (local drive for your host OS, and a separate external drive over USB for the guest OS). http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000714.html Now flash drives are different. As Ole pointed out, they've a hard limit on the no. of write cycles that they can do in a lifetime. This is why it's important to use special filesystems - these filesystems basically try to spread the writes around uniformly across the entire device to avoid excessive wear in certain areas. Cheers, -- Harish Mallipeddi http://blog.poundbang.in
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