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