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On Jan 11, 2008 3:00 PM, Alan McKinnon <alan.mckinnon@×××××.com> wrote: |
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> On Friday 11 January 2008, Anthony E. Caudel wrote: |
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> > 2nd question: I must be dense on this one so someone help me out. |
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> > Since a USB stick is seen as a hard drive, why can't I do a standard |
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> > install to it? Is it because until lately they haven't been large |
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> > enough? I'm thinking of using an 8GB one. |
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> |
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> There's a few reasons: |
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> |
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> 1. The memory used on those devices has a limited life - about 100,000 |
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> writes for the good ones and maybe 10,000 for the bad ones. With a |
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> standard install, frequent writes are the norm (think cache and other |
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> similar things). This usually ends up at the same spot on the disk, |
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> meaning your new install will last about a month if you are lucky. |
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> There are ways around this, for instance how a LiveCD does things. |
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> |
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You are right about the re-write life of flash media. However, there are |
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filesystems which can help by not writing to the same location in the flash |
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media again and again. I recall JFFS2 being a such flash filesystem which is |
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available for linux. |
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> |
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> 2. Booting off it is a pain. You need drivers for the entire USB stack |
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> at boot time, which usually means a ginormous initrd. |
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> |
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Why not compile them in the kernel? |
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> 3. Size, which you mentioned |
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8GB is pretty large IMHO. You should be able to fit quite some software + |
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data on it. My *entire* gentoo distribution fits in just over 2GB... though |
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I must confess that I am a little minimalistic. |
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_r |
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