[Nottingham] USB flashing your distro?

[Michael Erskine]

On Wednesday 16 April 2008 12:59:24 Andy Smith wrote:
> > The main idea is not to unduly wear the flash during normal use.
> Certainly doable, but generally pointless as modern flash media
> doesn't have a low write cycle limit.  They will last for tens of
> years while writing 24/7.

WRONG! Unless a writing strategy is employed to sensibly distribute the wear 
across the flash chips (known as a "Wear-Leveling Mechanism"), a dim-witted 
filesystem such as, say FAT, can hit 10000 write cycles to the same area of 
the flash drive (e.g. the root directory region) by writing just 8Mbytes of 
data. Most of your USB flash devices nowadays employ such a strategy in 
firmware but be aware that some wear-leveling algorithms are problematic with 
some filesystem types and some disk usage profiles.

In short: read-only :)

-- 
What does not destroy me, makes me stronger.
		-- Nietzsche
"Yeah, like some spine-crushing injury!"
               --msemtd
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