[sf-lug] "Stick PC" and other SFF computers

[Ken Shaffer]

On 9/8/23, Rick Moen <rick at linuxmafia.com> wrote:
> Quoting Ken Shaffer (kenshaffer80 at gmail.com):
>
>> Thanks Rick, that was very informative.  The storage is definitely the
>> weak
>> point.  I booted off an USB stick for about a year before the stick wore
>> out (then just switched back to the internal Ubuntu 14.04).  The 32GB
>> (not
>> 64GB after all), micro sd has been in the stick for four years, collected
>> 300000+jpgs from a few security cams, and hasn't given me any problems.
>
> And I'd expect it wouldn't, with that usage model.
>
> Flash storage generically has the problem that each cell can do only a
> limited number of erase-rewrite cycles, and _server_ duty simply
> involves a lot of those.  And on Unixes, even reading files normally
> also involves a lot of writing, if only because of metadata needing to
> be updated.
>
> Laying down a long series of picture files, one after another, in a long
> series, and then mostly doing nothing with them, does not involve a lot
> of erase-write cycles.  Thus my point.

Yes, it wouldn't be the pictures that wear out the flash, it would be
the directories getting 100s of k entries.  Since I'm not reading the
pics much, going with the default mount options for ext4 work (not
even using the noatime option).   ext filesystems seem to do the
buffering right, holding things in memory, delaying the writes, and
collecting all the dir changes for a group of pics before doing any
actual write to the flash.

>
> If you are not familiar with the important ways that flash media as a
> general class differ greatly from hard drive, that is something worth
> studying, and I'm not going to give a lecture on it here and now.
>
> I
>> also email the pics out, so the stick's just a local backup.
>> The wireless
>> and bluetooth work just fine, and I mostly use a USB hub for kb and
>> mouse.
>
> The latter typifies the things for which USB is a win, relative to what
> it replaced.  You mention USB hubs:  Man, one indicator of how much
> troubles those (sometimes, not always) cause is that every single
> troublshooting guide for USB problems starts with "First, does your
> problem persist without any USB hubs?"
>
>
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