nano and Fedora 12 LiveCD

Rick Stevens ricks at nerd.com
Sat Nov 21 01:31:39 UTC 2009


On 11/20/2009 01:06 PM, Wolfgang S. Rupprecht wrote:
>
> Bruno Wolff III<bruno at wolff.to>  writes:
>> Note that images greater than 4 GiB (which is less than what fits on a DVD
>> by a few hundred MiB) are still a problem. People using FAT for a file system
>> have a maximum file size of 4 GiB. So providing larger images for download is
>> going to give some people problems.
>
> I'm wondering what the collective wisdom is on FAT and flash memory.  If
> one doesn't care about MS products, does anyone really need to use FAT?
> I've been formatting my USB flash drives with ext3 or ext4 for a while
> now.  Mostly it was because I was sick of the filenames and permissions
> getting trashed, but if there was a filesize limit I dodged all the
> better.  So far the only thing that failed with ext3 was when I tried
> sticking a ext3 flash into my Google G1 Android (linux) phone.  That has
> also got to be a prime example of irony.  The only other case I needed a
> FAT FS was when upgrading the firmware on an Asus mobo from the BIOS.

Most Linux filesystems do a lot more writing (journals, et al) than
FAT does.  Since you have a limited number of write cycles on a FLASH
memory, I'd tend to reserve those for real work, not updating journals,
bad block lists, etc.
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