I was thinking more of speed. They've got to be faster than a hard drive. I've got this cute little adaptor that takes one of the SD cards and converts it into and IDE connection. But the flash memory has a limit on how many times it can be erased before they are damaged. It's quite high but I can see /tmp or /var hitting that limit. I was thinking of putting those partitions on an actual hard drive. The little card can be "locked" so no information can be written (it's a jumper). So once you install Linux it would 1) boot quickly and 2) couldn't be changed unless you had physical access to the box.

gary hildebrand <wa7kkp@gmail.com> wrote:

I would say since those thumbdrives are solid state, theoretically they should last forever, barring fire, flood, act of God, or static discharge . .

I'd like to do that myself, get an 8 GB thumb and install SuSE on it and run it on the St. Joe library machines, completely bypassing their native o/s. I don't think they'd like it unless I could prove to them it wouldn't muck up something in Windoze (version of the week).

Gary Hildebrand

St. Joe, MO

From: "Brian Kelsay" <ripcrd@gmail.com>
Subject: Re: Installing Linux to a 4gb usb microdrive

There's info out there on how to prevent excessive writes. Google for Linux
on a CF.