OS or Live OS On Flash Memory Card?

Boris_yo

Limp Gawd
Joined
Oct 22, 2011
Messages
224
Hello,

I was wondering if there are bootable flash thumb drives, would flash memory card be a good idea? I guess for main OS it won't due to constant writing of data but how about to use Live CD stuff on them like Windows, Linux for troubleshooting and repair purposes?

I heard how not using SSDs for several months increases their risk of failure because NAND memory needs occasional energy. I wonder how flash memory cards would be in that perspective.

P.S. Am I the only one who noticed spelling mistake in "Digital Artwerk" sub-forum under "Bits & Bytes" patent forum?
 
Hello,

I was wondering if there are bootable flash thumb drives, would flash memory card be a good idea? I guess for main OS it won't due to constant writing of data but how about to use Live CD stuff on them like Windows, Linux for troubleshooting and repair purposes?

I heard how not using SSDs for several months increases their risk of failure because NAND memory needs occasional energy. I wonder how flash memory cards would be in that perspective.

P.S. Am I the only one who noticed spelling mistake in "Digital Artwerk" sub-forum under "Bits & Bytes" patent forum?
All flash media is bootable so long as the motherboard supports it and the appropriate bootloader is present on the drive. Are you talking about a USB drive or something like an SD/CF card plugged into a reader? If it's the latter, readers that are built into the machines (e.g. tablets and laptops) will most certainly do it, but it becomes a little more iffy if it's a USB reader, as the mobo bios has to have the basic driver to use one loaded into it already. (You can test this out by plugging in a reader with a card in it, entering the bios at startup and see if it shows up on the list of storage devices).

How long it remains viable when not used kind of depends on the age and quality of the drive. All flash drives use the same NAND tech as SSDs, with all the variations of quality, features and controllers therein. It's plenty likely that the data will able to be read at least for a few months spent unpowered, but could be much longer, as it just depends on the particular quality of what's in that drive. I have plugged in flash media that sat in a drawer for more than a decade with no issue, but that was old, SLC stuff.

If you aren't going to use it very often, but you have a particular setup you need for it, you can create the ISO or folder on your main computer (or wherever your bulk data is stored) and just refresh a drive when you need it. That's what I do since I don't need to use one that often. If you just need a blank default OS and aren't going to use it that often, it's easy enough to just start fresh every time with the latest version.

As to the PS, that's intentional nerdity. ;)
 
Old TLC which they don't make anymore? These days they water down everything to save moneys, aren't they?



It gave me Miley Cyrus vibes...
SLC, the original 1 bit per cell. The flash was a 4 MB CF card that came with a digital camera from 2000. Can still occasionally be found in very niche applications, much like the nearly as good MLC these days, unfortunately. Bringing costs down to sell more is the name of the game isn't it? But for the majority of consumers, TLC is just fine. For the rest of us, there's Optane :) (for now).
 
Flash (thumb) drives and sd cards will work, but are often slow, and they have limited write cycles compared to SSDs and HDDs.

If you just boot and have it readonly, it'll last for a long time. Eventually it might start bugging out due to flipped bits, but re-flashing the OS will fix that. An SD card can survive a few full disk flashes before degrading, more or less depending on quality.

If you constantly install updates and have your cache and swap on it, it may degrade in a year or two...more or less depending on usage and flash quality.
 
You are talking about switching lever on SD card to read-only?
Should I make it also persistent partition?
No, I meant mounting read only in the OS, although that's effectively the same just at the hardware level. If you flip the switch though, no write activity will be allowed at all, so anything you'd want to persist between boots would need to be written to another disk entirely.
 
If you flip the switch though, no write activity will be allowed at all,
That's correct, however, I managed to buy a supermarket quality level USB card reader once, that would occasionally corrupt some data on the card despite the lever being in the read-only position.
 
HUSER=250566]michalrz[/USER] What if you added another read-only layer but through software?
I have not tried that tbh. As soon as it corrupted files being copied off the card the second time I hid it in the deepest drawer.
Also, the read only lever is actually just to tell the computers software if writes are allowed.
 
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