Would a Transcend USB Flash Module of 2GB work?

[Alwin Roosen]

Hi Jonas,

Thank you for the tips!

Could you explain to me how the swap partition would work? In the manual
() they say to remove the swap from fstab. I don't know much of
partitioning since this is setup-related and almost always the same on
our servers. Normally you would create a swap partition twice the size
of the memory capacity. But if you have a server with 1GB memory, and a
2GB flash-disk, how would this work?

Alwin Roosen

-----Original Message-----
From: Jonas Lund [mailto:whizzter at gmail.com] 
Sent: woensdag 25 juni 2008 15:31
To: Alwin Roosen
Cc: freebsd-hardware at freebsd.org
Subject: Re: Would a Transcend USB Flash Module of 2GB work?

> I want to install FreeBSD onto an USB Flash Module from Transcend. The
> links below are the product page and datasheet in PDF. It says it
should
> be compatible with OS that supports USB standard.

Like jeremy said the USB stack ain't overly sexy. Altho as far as i've
used it umass hasn't caused too much problems.

If you are building kiosks or similiar systems that are mostly used to
launch programs and not write too much to the disk then installing on
a 'el cheapo usb thingy might be just the thing. I did something
similar a little while back (linux tho) and it's quite simple/cheap
for something like that.

2 things.
- mount with noatime (wearing the memory just because accessing files
is quite stupid)
- make sure your system has enough memory to avoid swapping, while you
can certainly put a swap on flash i wouldn't recommend relying on it
as the errors that finally crops up could be subtle and catastrophic
or just errors. (how does freebsd handle a swap disk going bad?)

/ Jonas