[TriLUG] Flash Friendly Filesystems: was e2fsck under cron gets retcode=8 operational error

Kevin Otte nivex at nivex.net
Fri Sep 21 15:18:33 EDT 2012


The reason you use ext[234] on a thumb drive is because they have an 
abstraction layer between the computer and the flash chip(s) that makes 
them appear as rotating media with cylinders, heads, and sectors. This 
abstraction layer also performs the function of write leveling on your 
behalf.

The flash filesystems you speak of assume the kernel has direct access 
to the actual flash chips and must therefore do the leveling and error 
checking itself.

-- Kevin

On 09/21/2012 03:02 PM, Steve Litt wrote:
> On Fri, 21 Sep 2012 04:29:12 -0400, Joseph S. Tate said:
>
>> Why are you using ext2/3/4 on a thumb drive instead of a FS built for
>> flash storage so that you get error detection and correction as a
>> feature of the FS instead of having to kludge this whole convoluted
>> thing together?
>
> Hey Joseph,
>
> I never knew there was such a filesystem. I've used ext4 on flash
> drives because it gives me a lot less problems than the Windows
> filesystem that comes on thumb drives.
>
> What are some good filesystems to put on flash drives?
>
> Thanks
>
> SteveT
>
> Steve Litt                *  http://www.troubleshooters.com/
>                            *  http://twitter.com/stevelitt
> Troubleshooting Training  *  Human Performance
>




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