On 27/08/11 02:25, Martin McCormick wrote:
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
Based on my experiences using ext3 as a file system for running Debian on USB sticks. Single partition (no swap), logging redirected to vt12.
2 identical sticks (major brand) - identical builds - noatime enabled on one, not on the other, both got roughly the same amount of use. The one without noatime died earlier this year after approx 2 years of use - the other has been upgraded to Squeeze and still works fine.
Hardly empirical evidence but... I bought a larger USB stick (cheap and nasty) early this year - installed Debian onto it, forgot to enable noatime - it died last week.
I'm not certain of the answer - but would strongly suggest enabling noatime on the flash drive - and moving /tmp and /var to a non-flash drive.
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