Re: Which FS for USB Flash Drive
On Tue, Jan 27, 2009 at 11:07 AM, Kushal Koolwal
<kushalkoolwal@hotmail.com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Does anybody have any experience with installing Debian (say Lenny) on USB
> flash drives? I would like to install Debian on my PQI 4 GB USB flash drive
> but I am not sure which filesystem to use - ext2, ext3, XFS?
I just grabbed a 4G USB and did my standard home install on it. I
think I went with ext3, but after reading the rest of this thread, may
change that.
Some issues that I came across:
I got confused during one installation and accidentally installed grub
on my internal harddrive rather than the flash drive. Since this is a
work laptop with an encrypted harddrive, wiping out the boot parittion
made the primary system unbootable and had to reinstall that. Whoops.
With my upgraded laptop, boot order changed from the time I booted
from the install CD to to when I boot from the flash drive. I had to
end up tweaking grub to point to the correct partition.
I have some typical laptop issues that I think are not related to USB:
had to install wired because I have to use non-free firmware to get
wireless working, and since I run with /home mounted via NFS.
Regularly my system tries to load the automount maps before wireless
is up; I end up logging in as root once to reload them before logging
in as my real user.
Something to consider is: do you want swap on your flash drive or
not? Don't you need swap in order to suspend? That could possibly
speed up subsequent boot times. Personally I've not had success with
suspend, but I can't remember right now if I set up swap on the flash
drive or not.
The biggest problem I have is, generally I'm using the flash in my
laptop, and it sticks out quite a bit. I suspect I'll break it before
I wear out the write cycles. If I ever come across the right CF or
whatever media for a decent price, I might go ahead and purchase that,
just so it's more internal the the system.
The second biggest problem is the stupid thing flashes this bright
blue light every once in a while, which is really annoying when the SO
is trying to go to sleep.
So, I'm running a laptop off of USB flash with /home mounted over NFS.
It's not going to win any performance benchmarks, but I'm satisfied
with it.
mrc
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