[BUGS] thoughts about usb flash drive usage

[Peter Jeremy]

Christmas greetings to all.

On Tue, Dec 25, 2007 at 09:04:31AM +1100, jonathan michaels wrote:
>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 ?

Modern flash devices use a variety of write-levelling techniques as
well as invisible spare sectors to provide quite high write lifetimes.
I've seen figures that suggest that a typical device will last for
decades when continuously written at it maximum rate.

Assuming that the OS supports it (and I'm not sure about *BSD's swap
code), the way flash wears is a good match for swap because it doesn't
matter if arbitrary sectors go bad - the swap code can just avoid them.

My main concern would be the write performance:  USB1.1 is far too
slow.  USB2.0 would work well as long as the flash disks are USB2 and
your system has a supported USB2 (ehci) controller.

I suggest you set it up and see how it goes...

BTW, you can't dump to a USB device so if crash-dumps are of interest,
you will need to invest in a disk partition to hold the crashdump.

>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.

Definitely, yes.  Most SOHO NAS and router boxes are running Linux
off a flash disk.

-- 
Peter Jeremy
Please excuse any delays as the result of my ISP's inability to implement
an MTA that is either RFC2821-compliant or matches their claimed behaviour.
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