Thank-you Michael for the opportunity to be able to do this.
I did have issues running on USB sticks then switched over to using one CF card and one USB stick.
I am guessing though that the performance and RW stuff is better (more reslient) on an SD card than a USB stick. Here I still have a Chumby running the main OS off a microSD card then chrooted it to a CF card such that they both were running. The microSD card never gave me an issue and I did abuse it redoing the OS and much RW stuff while testing out the Chumby a few years ago. I also utilize a 32 and a 16 Gb microSD card on my phone for movies and music and software running (storage and not OS running on phones). I have not scrambled any of them with the phones to date over the last few years.
Personally I have had good luck with USB SSD and ZIF SSD (connecting via USB) and CF drives using them on mcsSprinklers running now for over two years on a little Seagate Dockstar running Archlinux or "Debian" Dockstar. I switched over to using SSD USB sticks a while ago finding them much better to work with than regular USB stick for various this or that builds. Prices have gone done a bit on these SSD sticks over the last couple of years. Still on the fence though which one will last longer; the USB SSD or the microSD cards that I use today. I have heard "bad" stories using both relating to trashed OS's. A power failure will mess with both of them.
Lately too have been moving "stuff" over to POE and have done that with the seagate dockstar (along with some touch screens and IP cams). I probably will move the Zee to a POE connection in the next few weeks.
That said I have also been playing with a little tablet that runs Linux, Android and Wintel. I initially tested the OS's with just regular USB sticks; over time moving the little tablets to "production" have switched them all to USB SSD or SSD ZIF drives. I have not had any issues with these; some running now over a year 24/7 remote controlled by Homeseer. The third generation of same little box has soldered MMC memory and and SD card slot for the running OS on it.
They are running well these days.
I don't pay attention sometimes to stuff I do (tinkering) and most likely after playing / testing resilience et al would probably move the OS to a different medium. Now mostly just backing up the HS3 directory and doing quick SD image backups as I keep playing with it and pushing it a bit trying to break it.
Doing a quickie google related to said topic found this randomly on some forum post.
Maybe I should have rephrased it. The problems I see may not be the result of write access to the card. It could have other explanations.
I have done a lot of testing though with solid setups (ext2 rather than ext3/ext4, read-only setups with AUFS and ram, etc). The updating part in my experience kills it. However it could be that taking it in and out frequently (daily) for months causes the problem. It could also be that maybe data isn't being properly flushed to the disk on shut down or something similar.
However that said I can think of other scenarios where lots of data does appear to have killed the USB flash sticks. I'll give you examples. I used the Trisquel flash drive to write bootable ISO images to it. I got maybe 5-10 images written to it before I started seeing disk errors. In that situation I didn't take the drive in and out though more than maybe a dozen times. Now these are cheap flash drives and not using SLC or anything like that. And it is pretty well known that the cheap stuff doesn't last.
However I have seen similar results with highly rated "never fails" MLC Micro SD cards that run significantly higher. I was testing with 16GB cards.
I've also seen problems with 32GB SDHC cards with SLC.
For those who don't know SLC is a higher quality flash which allows more writes to it before failing.
Some of the setups I've had included real world testing with things like raid: software raid'd that is between two 32GB SLC SDHC cards that used USB card readers. Ultimately the one drive failed in a rather short time. And yes- this was with a properly setup card. It was used in a read-only setup (and verified) except during the update process. The only other time it got written to were when files were saved to a second partition although this 2nd partition was not for swap. It was for data and did not hold a home directory and didn't get mounted until I manually mounted it. No data would have been written to it without having manually mounted it and then going to save a file.
And the reason for the raid'ing of SDHC cards and using SLC had to do with the fact flash is terribly unreliable in the real world.
Now- I'm not trying to dispute your results. There could be an explanation for this that has nothing to do with the read/write or the connection. I haven't figured it out and am doubtful though given all the evidence I've seen.
I think when SD/Micro SDHDC/etc cards are used to store files infrequently or used in cameras/phones/etc they tend to last. That has been my experience and what I've seen from reading well reviewed cards with hundreds of people reviewing the same product.
More data would be useful. My data comes from years and years and years of testing. I'm actually working on testing a type of Mini non-removable SSD card that fits into the Mini PCIe card slot (If I recall correctly, this has been a project that has spanned 10+ years which I infrequently gets to work on, these slots though have to support a USB function to work with the Mini PCIe SSD cards).
I've tried compact flash using adapters to IDE adapters in the past. I always seemed to run into problems with the adapters though. You can get an OS loaded on them, it boots, and shortly thereafter fails. I haven't done that though in 10+ years probably though. I last tested that with a 200Mgz Pentium system.
I have done a lot of testing though with solid setups (ext2 rather than ext3/ext4, read-only setups with AUFS and ram, etc). The updating part in my experience kills it. However it could be that taking it in and out frequently (daily) for months causes the problem. It could also be that maybe data isn't being properly flushed to the disk on shut down or something similar.
However that said I can think of other scenarios where lots of data does appear to have killed the USB flash sticks. I'll give you examples. I used the Trisquel flash drive to write bootable ISO images to it. I got maybe 5-10 images written to it before I started seeing disk errors. In that situation I didn't take the drive in and out though more than maybe a dozen times. Now these are cheap flash drives and not using SLC or anything like that. And it is pretty well known that the cheap stuff doesn't last.
However I have seen similar results with highly rated "never fails" MLC Micro SD cards that run significantly higher. I was testing with 16GB cards.
I've also seen problems with 32GB SDHC cards with SLC.
For those who don't know SLC is a higher quality flash which allows more writes to it before failing.
Some of the setups I've had included real world testing with things like raid: software raid'd that is between two 32GB SLC SDHC cards that used USB card readers. Ultimately the one drive failed in a rather short time. And yes- this was with a properly setup card. It was used in a read-only setup (and verified) except during the update process. The only other time it got written to were when files were saved to a second partition although this 2nd partition was not for swap. It was for data and did not hold a home directory and didn't get mounted until I manually mounted it. No data would have been written to it without having manually mounted it and then going to save a file.
And the reason for the raid'ing of SDHC cards and using SLC had to do with the fact flash is terribly unreliable in the real world.
Now- I'm not trying to dispute your results. There could be an explanation for this that has nothing to do with the read/write or the connection. I haven't figured it out and am doubtful though given all the evidence I've seen.
I think when SD/Micro SDHDC/etc cards are used to store files infrequently or used in cameras/phones/etc they tend to last. That has been my experience and what I've seen from reading well reviewed cards with hundreds of people reviewing the same product.
More data would be useful. My data comes from years and years and years of testing. I'm actually working on testing a type of Mini non-removable SSD card that fits into the Mini PCIe card slot (If I recall correctly, this has been a project that has spanned 10+ years which I infrequently gets to work on, these slots though have to support a USB function to work with the Mini PCIe SSD cards).
I've tried compact flash using adapters to IDE adapters in the past. I always seemed to run into problems with the adapters though. You can get an OS loaded on them, it boots, and shortly thereafter fails. I haven't done that though in 10+ years probably though. I last tested that with a 200Mgz Pentium system.
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