A Question about Journalling File Systems and Flash Drives

[Martin McCormick <martin@x.it.okstate.edu>]

	How hard is the ext3 file system on present-day flash
drives? I have some older Dell systems that run lenny and I put
a flash drive on as the boot drive on one of those systems and
it works great, but for how long?

	What got me to thinking was that I have a system using
conventional magnetic-based hard drives and ext3 file systems.
The second hard drive is not used as often and I noticed that
the system shuts it down to rest until one calls for a file off
the secondary drive. If the journal for all drives is on the
boot drive, then that explains everything. If not, one would
expect the secondary drive to be awake all the time since the
journal would write every five seconds or so.

	Thank you.

Martin McCormick WB5AGZ  Stillwater, OK 
Systems Engineer
OSU Information Technology Department Telecommunications Services Group