[BUGS] thoughts about usb flash drive usage

[Jerahmy Pocott]

On 25/12/2007, at 9:04 AM, jonathan michaels wrote:

> greetings all, christmas and all that ..
>
> i have managed a couple of toshiba 1 and 4 gb flash drives (two
> or three of each) and i was wondering are these thingies
> stable, robust, reliable enough to be able to be used as a
> ("THE") swap partition for a desktop machine ?

I know the technology has come a long way, so I'm not sure how  
relevant this still is, but my understanding of 'flash' memory is that  
it has a limited amount of times it can be written to. So it would be  
bad for a swap space that is changed a lot in that regard. Writing to  
flash memory is also slower than to a hard disk.

But I'm not really up to date on the current state of these usb flash  
drives, so maybe they aren't limited by writes any more, they would  
still be slower to write to though..


> while on this train of thought, would one of these devices be
> reliable/stable enough to serve as teh root partition for a
> desktop machine or even a home user type router/gateway type
> server'ish machine.

I think serving as a root partition would work well, since it  
virtually never gets written to and would make it as simple as  
plugging in a bootable flash drive.

Cheers,
Jerahmy.