What brand / size of flash drive would you recommend ?
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I would like to get a flash drive to run Trisqel on, as a portable OS.
What rugged, dependable brand would you folks recommend?
Thank you.
-Zem
Get an usb 3 memory flash stick.
I have tested sandisk nano 3.0 32gb. Read write higher than 60 and 10mb. Fast enough for common tasks if you install gnulinux.
Sandisk 3.0 Extreme, I have 3, and all still working.
Thanks!
Would something like the "slim" be any more durable, do you think? Or is it just larger capacity doing the same function?
https://www.thinkpenguin.com/gnu-linux/penguin-500gb-usb-slim-portable-hard-drive
Almost certainly: USB sticks quickly die if some sectors are frequently rewritten... and that typically is the case of /var on a GNU/Linux system. Hard disk are made for such workloads.
Flash storage usually comes with some embedded firmware that controls where everything is written to and tries to avoid writing to the same places over and over again. Eventually it's not going to succeed, and how quickly that happens depends on how much empty space the flash storage has and what wear leveling technique is used. But decent flash storage should be able to last a couple years, at least, with the frequency of writing you might expect from GNU/Linux.
By the way, wear leveling is why you ought to encrypt everything sensitive you write to flash storage: when you "shred" or "wipe" a file on flash storage, there's no guarantee that the data will actually be erased since the flash memory firmware is going to prefer doing the rewrites in other places.
onpon4 and Magic Banana:
Does that mean that a HDD is still more reliable in the long run?
I am a translator!
Sure it' more reliable, it wears out much much slowly :)
Thanks for the info!
"Sure it' more reliable"
An HDD would probably not survive a drop from, say, a desk (especially if it's running.) Something using flash memory would be more resilient to such a thing. So it depends on the definition of "reliable", LOL. :)
It depends on how you're using it. Hard drives generally wear down by spinning up and spinning down (e.g. when you shut down the computer) and to a lesser extent by other more random factors which gradually cause an increasing number of bad sectors, but are generally unaffected by repeated writes. Flash storage is only worn down by writing to it, but there's a fixed number of writes that can be performed on each part of the storage, and it becomes useless once that limit is reached.
So, basically, if you're leaving your computer on most of the time (like a server does), or if you're making tons of writes all the time, a hard drive is hands-down better than flash storage. But if you're only making occasional writes, constantly turning your computer on and off, and generally subjecting your computer to more physical stress (like sudden movements), flash storage can last much longer than a hard drive.
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