Bob, On Wednesday 16 March 2005 20:49, B. Stia wrote:
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Thanks in advance for any information and suggestions anyone can offer.
As a aside to this question, (excuse my ignorance) Can this be made bootable and a small OS be put on it? For a permanent kind of thing in a mobile installation. (GPS in an aircraft) Right now I am using a 1.6 gig regular hard drive. If not, how about a DOC that can be booted and then passed to the flash drive?
Well, we'd prefer it if you only asked questions to which already knew the answer, but... (In that spirit, I will refrain from asking what a DOC is.) You might want to investigate the practice mentioned earlier in this thread by Danny Sauer's of using cramfs if you're looking for a read-only, compressed file system for use in an embedded device. And keep the other advice in mind, too, that a flash "disk" is still flash RAM and it sustains only a limited number of writes. So Danny's other recommendation to avoid a journalled file system is probably well considered. I'm not personally familiar with the read/write patterns of the various file systems, so I just take him at his word. Besides, the fact that for users running the stock automount system for removable media means that devices are all written synchronously (the kernel does not engage in write-behind, saving disk blocks in buffer instead of writing them as soon as the higher-level software issues the write request), so there's little to be gained from using a journalled file system. And now to a related question--Since my USB flash RAM devices have no entries in /etc/fstab, how can I specify mount options? I'd like to specify "noatime" to further reduce the number of write operations performed on that device.
Bob S.
Randall Schulz