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Using a USB key instead of a hard drive

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SavannahLion:

--- Quote from: ChadTower on March 27, 2007, 02:21:21 pm ---I mean hell, just look up the write lifespan of your average usb thumb drive.  A lot of them are only in the 5 figures. 

--- End quote ---

Then he might want to keep a backup, just in case.  :cheers:

ChadTower:

He'll have to keep a lot of them.  There are thumb drive OS out there that do load from the key into RAM, as you've mentioned, but then you have to load your machine with enough RAM to do that... and now you're really moving away from the simple cost of having a $15 20g IDE drive in there.

A slightly more physically capable solution might be an older external IDE... you can get an USB IDE case for short money now, pop that cheap 20g drive in there, and then you have something actually suited to the task but still easily swappable.

crzywolf:
Try a compact flash card in stead of a USB key . You can buy a hard drive IDE to compact flash adapter converter off Ebay for a few dollars .

leapinlew:

--- Quote from: ChadTower on March 27, 2007, 01:58:29 pm ---Fast access?  Not sure about that.  At least it would be easy to pop out and make changes.

My main concern would be how long it will hold up under the type of heavy usage this would need.  These things aren't usually primary devices.

--- End quote ---

I was under the impression that a USB key is much faster than a hard disk. I've booted machines from a USB key and loaded an OS on the key and it is quite fast.

I guess the write cycles is the biggest concern. Lets say a usb key has a write cycle of 500,000 cycles before it dies. How quickly would I eat through those cycles?

My primary thought was if making the machine solid state would improve more reliable, it could be worthwhile. I'd really need to know if 500,000 write cycles would take 100's of years to hit or a few days.

grundle:
It can last for some time, but make sure you turn off virtual memory (paging file).  And then you'll have to deal with the reduced performance of this.

Microcenter regularly has 1gig thumb drives for $10, and 2 gig for $13.  Certainly worth a try, even if you have to find a new solution a couple months down the road.

The flash hard drives have complex wear levelling algorithms implemented which change the physical location of each "sector" randomly.  Then they sense when they are going bad and mark them so that they aren't used again.  We're using a 16gig flash drive at work.  It runs about $1000, but it's awesome.  No heat, very low power draw (it's a battery operated system.)  I'm hoping for one to "fall off the truck", if you know what I mean.

If you're comfortable with Linux you can boot from the USB stick, but create a RAM Drive.  This eliminates all writes to the stick.  Basically it copies the contents of the drive to RAM.  Any edits that are made are just changed on the RAM.  If you want to keep the changes you enter a couple of commands and it gets written to flash.  USB stick would last for years.

Pretty complicated though.  If you don't do these things for a living or have already done it, probably best to just turn off virtual memory and cross your fingers.

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