[sf-lug] Belated writeup of last SF-LUG meeting

[Akkana Peck]

Rick Moen writes:
> About mass storage:  I would never even dream of running a server on a
> microSD card.  Good God.  Or anything USB-connected as main storage
> (though that is not anywhere near as bad as microSD).  Not reliable
> enough by half, and there are _so_ many better things.
> 
> Some will claim otherwise, and I'll only say, "Sure, think that, and
> find out."  

When I was frequently moving between a desktop and a laptop, I got the bright idea to move my whole email directory onto a USB stick or SD card (I forget which, but I think they're pretty much the same technology) and just plug it in to whichever computer I was using at the time, avoiding the need to rsync the directory back and forth all the time like I'd been doing.

(And yeah, in this modern age I know 99% of people keep their email on a cloud server, but I'm frequently in places that don't have reliable net access, so I insist on keeping a local copy of my email.)

That lasted maybe a week and a half, before flakiness like errors in copying started appearing. Fortunately I'd been making frequent backups because I didn't entirely trust the setup, so I didn't lose any email, but I gave up quickly on the idea of using a cheap USB stick or card as primary storage.

I'm still surprised that problems happened so soon; I would have expected it to be good for at least several months. It was the first time I'd ever used cheap flash in that way, keeping it constantly mounted all day and writing to it every few minutes. Maybe I just got unlucky with that piece of hardware ... or maybe they're all crap. Anyway, based on one very small unscientific data point I agree with Rick's "not reliable enough by half".

        ...Akkana