On Wed, Nov 04, 2009 at 06:48:55PM +0000, unforgettableid wrote: > Hi all, > > I usually get around my city of Toronto, Canada by bicycle. I fall off my > bike > once a year or so. Therefore I don't carry breakable electronics like my > laptop unless I know I will need them. But I sometimes need to use my Debian > OS, my files, and some shell scripts I've written when I'm away from home. So > I invested Cdn$100 in a 16GB SDHC card to carry in my pocket every day and > boot > Debian Linux from. I used it for a year, but the card's write speed is quite > slow, so I've stopped using it. I now have four options, and wonder which is > best. > > 1. Use my laptop's internal hard drive to boot Debian from, and leave my > laptop running at home every day. But this costs the environment, and the > electricity costs add up over time too. > > 2. Buy a faster flash card. If you do a Google search for [ cf iometer > benchmarks ] you can find some. But this option might cost me Cdn$200 or > more; > option 4 seems like it'll be cheaper and almost as convenient. > > 3. Buy a 2.5" external HDD. But I'm told that when these fall, they're much > more likely to break than flash. > > 4. At http://rtr.ca/run_from_ram/ there's a tool that easily lets you use > some > union filesystem on top of flash storage to speed things up. I can set it up > to union my laptop's internal HDD on top, when it's available. > > 5. I'm sure there are other options which I haven't thought of. Feel free to > suggest more options. > I have been experimenting with Debian Live on a USB stick and I don't find the read/write speed to be a hinderance. Of course "slow" is in the eye of the beholder. I'm using an 8 GB cheapo USB stick. I don't know what the specs are, but I certainly didn't pay extra for a fast one. I also haven't experimented with very large files. I typically use LXDE or Fluxbox as my GUI, which may help the speed.
My understanding is that there's an optional feature with Debian Live that lets you run everything in a ramdisk, and it syncs to the USB at logout/shutdown. This is similar in concept to #4 above. Don't ask me how to set it up though -- I'm still a novice with Debian Live. -Rob -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
