On 12/02/16 10:07, Richard Owlett wrote:
I have a well used Lenovo R61 Thinkpad whose sole raison d'etre is to
serve as a test platform for experiments which may spectacularly fail.
To quote a product description, it has:
Card Reader
4 in 1 card reader
Supported Flash Memory
Memory Stick PRO, MultiMediaCard, SD Memory Card, xD-Picture Card
My local supplier has 32GB cards in stock. Not sure which of the above
flavors, as I just asked him what he had available that were compatible
with my hardware.
I'm pondering an application that could be accomplished with USB flash
drives.
It would be much "NICER" if that x GB were physically "inside" the
laptop's profile.
My questions:
1. Can Debian (and to what extent) make use of that storage?
2. Can Debian itself reside on that medium?
I'm thinking in terms of changing look/feel/function/capabilities/...
of the machine by swapping media before "power up".
[The BIOS *DOES* have some capability to specify precedence of boot
devices.]
3. Any Debian people using this capability who would care to comment?
["off list" replies fine]
I discovered that Debian can be installed to USB flash drives a few years ago, and now use them as a poor man's SSD system drive in my file server and backup server.
My favorite are SanDisk Ultra Fit 3.0 16 GB -- they have a compact form factor that only sticks out of the port ~1/4", they seek faster than a HDD (so random reads are faster than a HDD), and they write fast enough. The downside is that they run hot and the machine can stutter when multitasking. I provision them using 90% capacity (0.5 GB boot, 0.5 GB encrypted swap, 13.4 GB encrypted root) per SSD under-provisioning recommendations, but haven't done any benchmarking to see if it has any effect. AFAIK there is no such thing as trim or secure erase on USB flash drives. I haven't seen any problems with worn out blocks (yet).
As others have commented, I don't think SDHC cards are designed for a lot of erase/ write cycles. STFW for the specifications to be sure.
I worked on a wearable computer product in late 2001 with a Windows 2000 CF system drive. The CF cards were chosen for motion/ vibration/ impact resistance and were expected to last at least as long as a HDD sitting in a desktop. Again, STFW for specifications.
David