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Old 03-25-2008, 10:39 AM   #1
lugoteehalt
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Running a program from a flash - will it ware it out.


Have put the window manager Enlightenment E17 onto a flash drive and it runs from there. But will this greatly reduce the lifespan of the drive?

TIA.
 
Old 03-25-2008, 02:59 PM   #2
salasi
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Repeated writes (not reads, writes) to any one location will accelerate the wear-out of flash. so, if you've put the swap onto the flash, probably. If not and if you don't repeatedly write stuff (conf files, personal data) maybe not. Particularly if you can arrange to scatter the writes around.
 
Old 03-26-2008, 01:12 AM   #3
cyberfishee
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IIRC modern flash filesystems use wear-leveling techniques - they try to move files to different places when they are written, so that the whole filesystem will wear more or less equally (as opposed to having several blocks fail while others are still brand new).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wear_levelling
 
Old 03-26-2008, 11:38 AM   #4
lugoteehalt
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Thanks, very informative.

I'll try and make sure there is no caching, conf writes; or as little as possible.
 
Old 03-27-2008, 02:50 AM   #5
salasi
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Quote:
Originally Posted by cyberfishee View Post
IIRC modern flash filesystems use wear-leveling techniques - they try to move files to different places when they are written, so that the whole filesystem will wear more or less equally (as opposed to having several blocks fail while others are still brand new).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wear_levelling
That's true, but there is no evidence that the OP will be using a 'modern flash filesystem' - in fact, if he is I would have expected him to say so.
 
Old 03-27-2008, 03:25 AM   #6
fietze
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Quote:
Originally Posted by lugoteehalt View Post
Have put the window manager Enlightenment E17 onto a flash drive and it runs from there. But will this greatly reduce the lifespan of the drive?
This very much depends on what parts of your file systems are located on the flash drive.

The more or less constant parts of the file systems can be located on the flash w/o problems. The constantly changing parts like log files, cache files etc. should be located on a regular HD or tmp file system if possible. So having "enlightment" on the flash drive doesn't say too much. Enlighment consists of binaries, icons, etc. Having those files on the flash is no problem at all. But enlighment probably also creates files, most probably inside /tmp and your $HOME. Those might be a problem if they are changing too frequently.

The wear of your flash or flash drive very much depends on the flash file system used or flash drive HW used. A flash file system on top of a regular flash as well as most recent flash drives use algorithms to do wear levelling. Be aware that the wrong file system (flash chips) or cheap flash drive HW might kill your flash more or less soon.

Good flash drive manufacturers even have a controller on board that remaps bad flash locations out and replaces those locations with spare flash locations on the fly.
 
Old 03-27-2008, 10:43 AM   #7
lugoteehalt
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Quote:
Originally Posted by salasi View Post
That's true, but there is no evidence that the OP will be using a 'modern flash filesystem' - in fact, if he is I would have expected him to say so.
I'm mounting it as 'vfat' - its file system is the one the manufacturers put on. There is no chance of me getting windows to use some exotic file system unless Windows XP Professional (a.k.a. Guild - sorry I've got a thing about that.) does it automatically. Need to use the flash on Windows unfortunately.

fietze says:
Quote:
Be aware that the wrong file system (flash chips) or cheap flash drive HW might kill your flash more or less soon.
So I'd better stop or I'll bugger it soonest?? It is nothing if not cheap. On the other hand it is so cheap that buggering it would not make the eyes water.

Just thought of something: I could put a fancy file system in a large file on it and loop mount or partition part of it with the said file system and put Enlightenment on that. That way I could still use windows. That work? What's the file system called?

Thanks for all the help.

Last edited by lugoteehalt; 03-27-2008 at 10:47 AM.
 
Old 03-27-2008, 11:56 AM   #8
fietze
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Quote:
Originally Posted by lugoteehalt View Post
I'm mounting it as 'vfat' - its file system is the one the manufacturers put on. There is no chance of me getting windows to use some exotic file system ...
Hmmm. For must of us FAT or NTFS is exotic.

But accessing e.g. ext2 on a (flash) drive under Windows is no problem today, there are ext2 drivers for Windows. But again, ext2 isnt't much better than FAT for a dumb flash drive or naked flash chips using e.g. mtd (low level flash drivers).

Quote:
So I'd better stop or I'll bugger it soonest??
As I said before, that very much depends on the following: what subdirectories or filesystem parts of your distribution will be located on the flash drive? Everything? Everything except /tmp?

As a rule of thumb (for very special cases this could be different) put the following subdirectories on the flash drive or not:

no problem:

/
/etc
/usr
/opt
/lib
/sbin
/dev (if the system is udev based this would be empty on the flash)

depends on the frequency of changes:

/srv
/home

never ever:

/tmp
/var

BTW: what flash drive manufacturer and type are you using? Did you check the specs of this drive?
 
Old 03-27-2008, 12:50 PM   #9
tredegar
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Quote:
Originally Posted by lugoteehalt View Post
... But will this greatly reduce the lifespan of the drive?
I have one of those (lovely) Asus linux eee PC's: No HDD, just flash memory. There was extensive discussion over on the eee forums about "wearing out" the flash memory. The "result" eventually made it to the wiki, which you can read here: http://wiki.eeeuser.com/ssd_write_limit

The bottom line is: Don't worry about it
 
Old 03-28-2008, 11:59 AM   #10
lugoteehalt
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I've got none of the questionable directories on it.

I'll change my mind again and stop worrying.

Think I'll do the special file system thing anyway.

Great thanks to all.
 
  


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