Pendrive as a disk

Forum: User Feedback
Topic: Pendrive as a disk
started by: mosfet

Posted by mosfet on Sep. 03 2006,13:24

From my (sth one day) short study od DSL pendrive distro I have a question....

Why DSL uses pendrive only as a Live CD? Why it cannot take full adventage of pendrive and use it as a hard drive (without that silly saving/restoring and loosing 'saved' data)?
Making my dreams come true would be a pendrive which converts my box into a linux machine, not another Live CD demo.

Thanks for the answers.

Posted by roberts on Sep. 03 2006,13:47

Because pendrives like any other flash memory devices have a limited numer of writes before they fail. Flash memory does not equate to a real hard drive.

Posted by mosfet on Sep. 03 2006,13:59

What about ability of writing all the stuf automaticly once during the system halting?

Posted by dbough on Sep. 03 2006,13:59

So you cannot backup files to the pendrive you are using as a LiveCD? If this is the case It does seem silly to use DSL as a portable OS.

Posted by mosfet on Sep. 03 2006,14:55

ofcorse I can (isn't it a Linux is all about

but for now on I don't know what files. For example, If I add some new package, how to make sure it'l be back there after reboot.....can it be "automatized" in some future versions of distro?

Can we consider using small 2,5'' HDD in USB-connected socket? Then we have mobility of USB device and 'unlimited' count of saves...

Posted by roberts on Sep. 03 2006,15:25

Of course you can backup to a pendrive. This discussion is bordering on ridiculous.
Now say you have 10,000 writes to a pendrive and you backup twice each day, so we have 5,000/365 or about 13 years of use. YMMV

Running a flash device like a hard drive is totally different.

The number of writes occuring while running an os is huge compared to the single write session during backup of user data files. And with the write once of the saved apps also is much kinder to flash. The difference of backup and mydsl app saving is explained in the Getting Started document and the wiki. If you use dsl apps from the mydsl system it is trivial to save them via a write once to whatever writeable persistent storage device you choose. If you are expecting DSL to make all the decsions for you then I would suggest to look elsewhere. DSL is certainly not a demo system.