@apvp: The behaviour of your installation is quite strange though. You should
check out your system logs (dmesg, Xorg.0.log, etc).
@Chris: I disagree on this one. I have been using a 4 GB CF card in my
Shuttle barebore for over a year running vanilla Debian 6.0 with the
modifications described above which will mostly limit unnecessary write
access to the media itself. The CF card still runs fine.
The german computer magazine C't did a test over 6 years ago where they tried
to kill a 2 GB USB stick by writing incredible often to the flash media but
even after 16 000 000 write cycles the stick didn't die. Unfortunately I did
not find the article itself but only a reference to it:
http://www.heise.de/ct/artikel/Ueberflieger-291740.html
Flash-Haltbarkeit
Bereits vor rund zwei Jahren haben wir versucht, einen USB-Stick durch
kontinuierliches Beschreiben eines einzelnen Blocks zu zerstören [4]. Damals
murrte unser Opfer auch nach 16 000 000 Zyklen nicht. In Anbetracht moderner
Wear-Leveling-Algorithmen haben wir unser Testszenario verändert: Diesmal
beschreiben wir einen 2-GByte-USB-Stick in jedem Zyklus von vorn bis hinten
mit (mehr oder weniger) zufälligen Daten. Alle 50 Schreibvorgänge prüft
ein Skript anhand der MD5-Prüfsummen, ob die Daten auch korrekt auf dem
Stick stehen. Bei einer Schreibrate von rund 7 MByte/s dauert ein
Schreibzyklus knapp 5 Minuten. Bislang hat der Stick in mehr als einem Monat
Dauertest über 23,5 TByte Daten klaglos gefressen und liefert auch nach
diesen 12 240 kompletten Schreibzyklen beim Auslesen keine Fehler.
The original article was this:
Boi Feddern, Speicherschwarm, 58 USB-Sticks mit zwei, vier und acht GByte,
c't 18/06, S. 168
I could try to find the article on my CTRoms, which have all articles of one
year stored as html if this is of interest. They are german though.
Given you use a high quality USB stick / CF card / SD card, it is pretty
unlikely that they will die within 2-3 years of normal use. When I say
"normal use" here, I am speaking about a Linux system taylored to flash usage
and everyday stuff (updating your system, writing mails, surfing the web,
etc). I would say that quickly failing flash media are a myth of the past. I
have tons of USB sticks varying from 1 to 16 GB in daily use and the only one
which died was a really cheap 1GB stick I got from a friend. Using a standard
Trisquel on a cheap USB stick without any modification might kill the stick
quite quickly. The big benefit of USB stick I see is simply the price. Even a
quality USB stick will only cost half the price of a cheaper SSD.
HTH,
Holger
P.S.: The arch wiki has several interesting articles on installing Linux to
Flash:
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Install_to_usb#Optimizing_for_the_lifespan_of_flash_memory
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/SSD#Tips_for_Minimizing_SSD_Read.2FWrites
P.P.S.: One important modification I forgot is related to the profile
directory of any Mozilla-based webbrowser.
Simply checkout this: http://www.verot.net/firefox_tmpfs.htm
