Best mount options for USB flash drives?

[Walter Dnes]

  Flash drives have a finite (large, but still finite) number of writes
before a sector "wears out".  I just got an MP3 player and am charging
the internal battery... via USB... nice.

  The player is formatted fat32 according to "fdisk -l".  I assume that
"noatime" is a necessity.  Even with a FAT32 fs, the "ls" command will
cause the "access time" attribute for a file to be rewritten.  "noatime"
overrides that.  I'm not sure whether or not "sync" is even possible on
a FAT32 mount, but my gut feeling is that "async" should be "kinder and
gentler" on the flash drive, because it gathers together a bunch of
separate writes into one big write.  Does USB2 versus USB1.1 make any
difference?

  Am I right, wrong, out to lunch, whatever?

-- 
Walter Dnes <waltdnes-SLHPyeZ9y/tg9hUCZPvPmw at public.gmane.org> In linux /sbin/init is Job #1
My musings on technology and security at http://tech_sec.blog.ca
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