On Wed, 15 Jan 2014, "Trent W. Buck" <trentbuck@gmail.com> wrote:
I have a few 4GB USB key deployments (on headless boxes) with stock Debian installed on them, and it wasn't a very nice experience. Mainly just that I/O is aggravatingly slow, especially for dpkg.
I don't know if SD (and a more modern FTL) would help in that respect.
USB keys are the cheapest available storage. CF cards are much better quality, faster and more reliable if you get the good ones. I haven't had the misfortune of doing any serious testing of SD cards, but I have had one fail in a phone out of 4 phones running SD for a few years - a much worse failure rate than hard drives but a statisticly insignificant test sample.
The other problem I had was that stock installs will want to fsck after an outage, and even with a journal that's suckily slow. (Especially when you're talking over the phone to a non-technical user who is reading boot output off a 19" monitor balanced in their lap or whatever. You know -- the usual.)
One thing to do when creating an ext3/4 filesystem is to use a much smaller number of Inodes than the default. Ext4 has significantly improved things over Ext3 because it won't needlessly check Inode block groups that are unchanged but I think that having fewer Inodes still helps. -- My Main Blog http://etbe.coker.com.au/ My Documents Blog http://doc.coker.com.au/