Re: A Question about Journalling File Systems and Flash Drives
On Sat 27 Aug 2011 at 11:19:20 +1000, Scott Ferguson wrote:
> 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.
I have just put unstable with an ext4 filesystem on a USB stick and find
your experience reassuring. Although there will be a backup stick it is
useful to not have to anticipate the drive becoming defunct in a month
or two. In what way upgrading will affect its lifespan I do not know but
it will be interesting to find out!
> 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.
Thanks for the reminder about atime. I had completely forgotton to
enable it at install time or afterwards.
The OP may be interested in
http://www.linuxfoundation.org/news-media/blogs/browse/2009/03/ssd’s-journaling-and-noatimerelatime
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