Re: A Question about Journalling File Systems and Flash Drives

[Brad Alexander <storm16@gmail.com>]

All I can offer is some almost-on-target empirical evidence. My daughter has had an Acer Aspire One for 3 or 4 years. Her /home was an 8GB Sandisk SD card. It never had any problems...until her husband noticed he had an SD card slot on his brand new win7 laptop...and grabbed her card and Windows partially formatted (corrupted) it. Admittedly she was running XFS on it, but it is still a journaling filesystem.

Since that 8GB card was broken, she upgraded to a 16GB card, which is running ext4. its been a year and no problems thus far.

For the record, I believe drive quality has improved in the past few years. I have heard that the limit on these drives is now a non-issue...

--b

On Fri, Aug 26, 2011 at 4:06 PM, green <greenfreedom10@gmail.com> wrote:

Martin McCormick wrote at 2011-08-26 11:25 -0500:

> How hard is the ext3 file system on present-day flash drives?

Not much worse than without a journal I think, but

>       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.

Normally, the journal for a filesystem is stored in the same partition as the
filesystem.

> If not, one would
> expect the secondary drive to be awake all the time since the
> journal would write every five seconds or so.

If nothing is being written to the drive, nothing needs to be written to the
journal. A sync does nothing if there is nothing in the buffers.

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