USB flash drives and Arch Linux ARM

[phireph0x]

Hi all,

I posted regarding reliability of USB flash drives in February and updated in early April (see viewtopic.php?f=9&t=8481). Now my replacement Kingston 16GB USB flash drive has also become corrupted (after ~3 months), so I'm taking a step back to reevaluate my configuration.

I've successfully ran ALARM on USB flash drives (generic 2 and 4GB drives) for well over a year in the past, so I know it's possible. I've been using ALARM since 2011. Obviously anything you read on the topic will stress the limited write cycles of flash media, yet users are still running Linux systems off of USB flash drives.

So my questions are:

What are the guidelines as far as configuration for system based on flash media? I'm using an ext2 FS and don't have extended logging enabled.

What are the recommended hardware specs for USB flash drives or models when running Linux?

Thanks in advance for your feedback, it is much appreciated

[Socaltom]

I found that ext2 for the rootfs always lead to corruption. Sometimes it lasted a while, but ultimately I would have to fsck it in order to get it to boot. using EXT3 with journal was the most reliable. I gave up on using thumbdrives, most took longer to boot than any hard drive I hooked up, so rebooting would halt because the HD would come up first and then it wouldn't boot.
So eventually I settled on using a HD with a 25GB rootfs and ext3 for my boot partition.
Tom

[phireph0x]

Thanks for the reply. I ended up giving up on USB flash drives as well and am installing ALARM on a USB HD.