Best mount options for USB flash drives?

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Mon, Apr 17, 2006 at 04:11:34PM -0400, Walter Dnes wrote:
>   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?

sync became an option recently.  It used to ignore it.  It is not a nice
thing to do to the flash driver, and makes accesses very very slow.

fat doesn't have a concept of atime or ctime, only mtime, so it does
nothing assuming it is even allowed by mount.

Len Sorensen
--
The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://tlug.ss.org
TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://tlug.ss.org/subscribe.shtml