[H-GEN] Flash drives and wear levelling: user experiences?

[Murray McAllister]

On Thu, Jul 31, 2008 at 8:31 PM, Benjamin Fowler <somelamer567 at gmail.com> wrote:
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>
> Hi all,
>
> These days, you can get heavily cut-down all-in-one motherboards like the following, with a built in compact flash slot, which makes it perfectly possible to build a tiny low power PC without any moving parts -- perfect for a firewall/router or TV streaming box:
>
> http://www.netgate.com/product_info.php?products_id=450
>
> I spent a bit of time today thumbing through a catalog and planning to order some new hardware to play with.  I basically want to set up a couple of cheap, cut down machines for around the house, starting with a cut down firewall/gateway box running something like OpenBSD which is easier to keep a close eye on than yum-cha branded off the shelf router hardware.
>
> The idea is to buy one of these and a CF card, put OpenBSD on it, and run it as a gateway box, while leaving my ASDL modem to just handle the phone line.
>
> My only worry at this stage, is how to go about installing the OS on the compact flash card, and configuring everything in such a way, that I don't burn holes in the CF card.  Some CF cards allegedly have hardware wear-levelling, which is good news (but slooow), but it seems like a good idea to try to set everything up so that the amount of writing to the CF card is minimised.
>
> My question to the HUMBUG collective is; has anybody else gotten any significant hands-on experience with working with cut-down machines running off flash drives, and want to tell us their experiences, and what they think is the best way to arrange the filesystem, etc to work well with flash media?
>
> Cheers,
>
> Ben.

This might not be what you are after:
<http://www.bress.net/blog/archives/114-How-Long-Does-a-Flash-Drive-Last.html>

It is good if you are interested in how long USB flash drives might last.

Cheers.