I want to have another go with flash USB stick or SD cards. I had some pretty bad experiences in the past and prefer hard drive booting and operation. However bohdi seems to think it's doable with USB flash memory - and he knows more than me for sure !
I'm wondering if anyone has tried overprovisioning a USB SD card or flash drive. Overprovisioning basically means partitioning leaving free non-paritioned space at the end of the disk, usually between 7-28%. Commerce production systems use overprovisioning as standard, often the 28% I already mentioned - on both SSDs and hard drives. Samsung Pro SSDs can be overpovisioned using their software, right out of the box.
The rationale is that if there's a dodgy block then it can be mapped out into the non-partitioned space silently by the drive.
The unknowns are whether the flash memory on USB is as smart as an SSD and can actually make use of the non-partitioned space for wear-levelling and disappearing of bad blocks. I have for instance an old SD Card that will only work with FAT16, simply won't work with FAT32 or EXT ... so there's a lot of unknowns, but a big potential benefit in reliability if it works !
I ask the question, because 16GB or even 32GB flash drives are now pretty cheap. Debian only needs a few gig to run, less if the install for a very specific purpose. So there's potentially plenty of space to allow for overprovisioning to make a more reliable system - provided of course that it's actually used by the SD Card/USB drive.
Any takers ?
Cheers
Don Charisma
I'm wondering if anyone has tried overprovisioning a USB SD card or flash drive. Overprovisioning basically means partitioning leaving free non-paritioned space at the end of the disk, usually between 7-28%. Commerce production systems use overprovisioning as standard, often the 28% I already mentioned - on both SSDs and hard drives. Samsung Pro SSDs can be overpovisioned using their software, right out of the box.
The rationale is that if there's a dodgy block then it can be mapped out into the non-partitioned space silently by the drive.
The unknowns are whether the flash memory on USB is as smart as an SSD and can actually make use of the non-partitioned space for wear-levelling and disappearing of bad blocks. I have for instance an old SD Card that will only work with FAT16, simply won't work with FAT32 or EXT ... so there's a lot of unknowns, but a big potential benefit in reliability if it works !
I ask the question, because 16GB or even 32GB flash drives are now pretty cheap. Debian only needs a few gig to run, less if the install for a very specific purpose. So there's potentially plenty of space to allow for overprovisioning to make a more reliable system - provided of course that it's actually used by the SD Card/USB drive.
Any takers ?
Cheers
Don Charisma
