Re: A Question about Journalling File Systems and Flash Drives
On 27/08/11 22:37, Brian wrote:
On Sat 27 Aug 2011 at 11:19:20 +1000, Scott Ferguson wrote:
<snipped>
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!
I don't imagine upgrading will make much difference - the controller
distributes the writes evenly, for which reason I reserve 25% of space
when installing (instead of the default 10%). NOTE: I could be wrong
about that - I'm just guessing.
Full backups:-
dd if=/dev/deb_usb | gzip -1 -c > ./deb_usb.img.gz
Full restores:-
zcat ./deb_usb.img.gz | dd of=/dev/deb_usb
rsync on a daily basis.
To redirect logging to vt12 add:-
*.* -/dev/tty12
to the end of /etc/rsyslog.conf
dmesg will bitch but still function.
<snipped>
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.
I originally used it to see if it truly improved performance (it does, a
little) - increased lifetime was an unintended side effect.
The OP may be interested in
http://www.linuxfoundation.org/news-media/blogs/browse/2009/03/ssd’s-journaling-and-noatimerelatime
Nice article.
When my P2V tools support ext4 fully I'm moving all my hdds to it. I've
tested it with one server, and VirtualBox supports it with host I/O
caching enabled - no problems so far.
Cheers
--
"When two or more people agree on an issue, I form on the other side."
— Bill Hicks
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