Christoph Peus wrote: > Hi, > > assumed that I have installed OpenBSD to an USB memory stick and the box > is booting from this "drive" successfully and I've taken these > precautions to avoid frequent writes to the write cycle limited memory > stick: > - there's no swap space configured > - all logging is redirected to an external syslog server > - the system offers no service which needs to write to harddisk (only pf > running) > > Are there still reasons not to use such a setup? Are there system > processes, which write to disk frequently? Other possible problems? > Thanks! > > Christoph
I just bought a 2G USB flash drive for less than $20US. LONG before the flash fatigues from the finite number of writes, I'll: 1) Lose the thing. 2) Drop something on it and snap it off 3) step on it 4) forget what computer it is on 5) Something I haven't thought of, but will get everyone laughing themselves silly when I do it. Long before that 2G drive fails, I'll probably have replaced it with a 200G flash drive that I paid $10 for...even if none of the above "disasters" happen. You could also use the "noatime" option of mount/fstab, see mount(8). You could use pre-loaded MFS or you could just not worry about it. :) At the price these things are hitting now, I'm suspicious the failures of them won't be due to excess write cycles... Nick.
