will we see more "usb thumbdrive" systems?

[/dev/null]

Now that 2GB thumbdrives are sub $100 and 4GB thumbdrives scale well in price , are you guys going to start building more small systems just with thumb drives?

My router has a 1GB compactflash and runs mfs (under freebsd) for daily use and syncs things to disk once every couple of hourse. WOrks great, quiet, low power, low heat.

Edit: My router has been running more than a year with no problem.

Rob

 

[unhappy_mage]

Well, they'd be fun toys, but I don't have budget for toys right now - I want some really expensive ones before I work on cheap ones

 

[xonik]

When you break it down, "thumbdrives" still use flash memory, which is limited to about 100,000 read/write cycles at best. For many OSes like Windows, this is a very constraining figure when implementing flash memory as a boot drive. For specialized applications like routers, steps can be taken to minimize read/writes, but most OSes are designed for the characteristics of mechanical hard drives, not flash memory.

 

[/dev/null]

When you break it down, "thumbdrives" still use flash memory, which is limited to about 100,000 read/write cycles at best. For many OSes like Windows, this is a very constraining figure when implementing flash memory as a boot drive. For specialized applications like routers, steps can be taken to minimize read/writes, but most OSes are designed for the characteristics of mechanical hard drives, not flash memory.

That is a good point to bring up, but in that case, you have storage devices similar in size but with a physical disk .

Also, I find not being able to work with a flash drive as a boot drive an OS limitation. If an OS/harware solution was designed (such as my router example) then it should be very feasible. I wish WindowsXP (my favorite desktop OS) had mfs to work with.

Edit: After further reading, it appears flash drives have limited writes _per block_, and that even when re-writing the same file over and over can change blocks to keep from wearing out one.

Rob

 

[Vertigo Acid]

Also, file-system has a lot to do with the feasability. You are probably using JFFS2, which is specifically designed to avoid wear on flash devices.

 

[unhappy_mage]

My router has a 1GB compactflash and runs mfs (under freebsd)

The jffs2 filesystem is under GPL, I understand, so the BSD-license people can't put it in their kernel. XFS might be a good choice (dunno about licensing issues) - it copies-on-write everything, so it ends up on a new block.