Re:varlog mounted in an USB flash drive

On Sun, 19 Mar 2006 21:05:16 +0100, Michael Heiming staggered into the Black Sun and said:

Did you make sure that disk I-O is your bottleneck? Go do that first. Never try to solve a problem until you're sure it's a problem.

This is true, but it won't happen quite as quickly as Michael thinks it will. An individual bit cell in flash memory can be written to about 500,000 times. After that, the bit cell may or may not have the same value it's supposed to have when you try to read it. All flash drives have wear-leveling built in, so that different physical sectors can be mapped to the same logical sector, so your superblock doesn't wear out before the rest of the filesystem.

Also, if you try to use a USB1 flash drive for anything that's written to frequently, you'll make your I-O problems *much worse*. USB1 is too damn slow for anything.

Writing syslogs to another machine may be a good idea. Ifhome is heavily used, mounting it via NFS may not work as well as you hope. 100bT is a fair bit slower than a local disk, even a local disk that's used fairly heavily.

-- Matt GThere is no Darkness in Eternity-But only Light too dim for us to see Brainbench MVP for Linux Admin mail: TRAP + SPAN don't belong ----------------------------- penguins, is Tux." --MegaHAL