On Friday 11 January 2008, [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.
> Does desktop RAM get constantly refreshed while powered and it > doesn't need to keep any data when not powered? > Is that the difference? I'm not sure what you are asking - you're question is poorly framed. So I'll answer what I think you are asking. USB sticks use flash RAM and other non-volatile memory technologies. It's not a magnetic disk, it does use transistors but is otherwise completely different to desktop RAM. It's also a whole lot slower. The operating system is almost constantly writing stuff to the disk, and not just swap space - many apps cache information and it has to be stored somewhere. This is not a problem for magnetic disks as they don;t really have a limit on the number of times they can be written to. Flash memory does, it stops working after a time. So once you write to a memory cell say 50,000 times, it's probably useless. Trouble is, you have no way of knowing which cells no longer work, so you have a disk with random corruptions. This is usually considered to be a VeryBadThing(tm). alan -- Alan McKinnon alan dot mckinnon at gmail dot com -- gentoo-user@lists.gentoo.org mailing list
