On 18/05/2021 17.55, L A Walsh wrote:
On 2021/05/16 18:57, -pj wrote:
...
I am wondering now about USB flash drive devices.
2. Does the use of "dd" on USB flash drives kill the limited lives on these devices in a similar manner also?
???!!... Depends on what you do with "dd". Why would you need or want to use 'dd' unless you want to transfer a disk image. Usually you want to xfer files so 'dd' wouldn't even come into the picture.
3. Does the use of "dd" on a mechanical drive have less of a negative lifespan effect than that of it's effects on SSD or USB devices?
--- Um...less of a negative effect? Well, since magnetic media isn't known to be very degraded by multiple r/w ops, it would probably generate less wear. But if you use 'dd' to copy a boot-disk-img which you want to use on a flash-drive, 'dd' could be less harmful, than formatting the flash drive, then copying all the files from some mounted source to the target media.
Provided the transfer size is bigger than the actual chunk size of the flash media. I never remember what it is? Suppose it is 16K. If you use the default size used by dd which is 512, it would write to the same chunk 16K/512 times. I think the optimal size would be a multiple of that chunk size. -- Cheers / Saludos, Carlos E. R. (from oS Leap 15.1 x86_64 (Minas Tirith))