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Reasonable 4GB+ SLC thumb drive

S

skypilot

Golden Member
We boot some of our servers from USB keys. Although most logging/writing is done to a RAM drive and committed every hour or two, I'd still feel better knowing I have a high-quality SLC thumb drive that will last 5+ yrs as a boot drive for these servers.

Anyone know of a good 4gb+ thumb drive that is SLC, preferably as reasonably priced as possible?
 
the best drives for booting an OS would be the eSATA drives, not the USB drives.
I don't know if they are SLC, but:
1. They should still last way more than 5 years
2. Why do you need them to last 5 years? they cost 50$ and in a year or two will be completely obsolete.
 
eSATA vs USB has no correlation with drive MTBF, it is the quality of wear leveling algorithms and the type of flash for a solid state disk.

Why do I want them to last 5+ yrs? Because that will be the service cycle of these servers, and I don't care if they are "obsolete". Performance of the boot drives means nothing in this case.
 
I was referring to the speed, and ease of booting off of eSATA compared to the USB drives... eSATA Will boot with anything, USB only with specific mobos and you have to make it into a USB boot drive (UGH) and then there are tweaks to do to the OS... a lot of pain. And eSATA IS MUCH faster.

MTBF is bull: 1.5 million hours = 171.23 YEARS

What you should concern yourself with is the write limit of SSD, the read limit, and the store limit.
Normally I would say to stay AWAY from any and all thumb drives as they do not have the quality of wear leveling (if they even HAVE wear leveling) that proper SSD have; thus for a home user a thumb drive will be ruined by an OS rather quickly.
BUT, as an OS drive on a SERVER you are basically just READING from it now and then (on the rare occasion that you reboot or update the server)... the life limit of SSDs is in WRITES only... so they should all last for essentially forever...

One cavet. After 10 years of NOT being written to, flash cells begin to lose stored data.

the intel X25 drives have a special algorithm that caps write speeds if needed to ENSURE they get 5 years. even without it, they should last a long long time, hundreds of years for most users due to how resilient they are... as an OS drive for a server it would be practically untouched.
 
Does the eSATA/USB OCZ Throttle do any wear leveling? eCost had the 32GB one listed for $20 (backordered) and canceled my order. I wanted to mod eSATA into my Acer Aspire One netbook and use it to boot (WAY faster than the 8GB SSD inside my AAO).
 
The OCZ Rally 2 Turbo is SLC. As of last week, I was able to purchase one from Amazon, and saw them for sale at various other retailers. The 4GB is <$50, but the 8GB is more than twice as expensive.

If you can use them, here are some alternatives, most of which are SLC, and have wear-leveling algorithms:

http://www.logicsupply.com/categories/flash_memory

Edit: I am referring specifically to the IDE and SATA flash modules in the link above.
 
SATA and IDE are commonly referred to as SSD rather then SATA flash or IDE flash. they all have wear leveling AFAIK.
 
Originally posted by: taltamir
SATA and IDE are commonly referred to as SSD rather then SATA flash or IDE flash. they all have wear leveling AFAIK.
Click to expand...

And your point is?
 
Originally posted by: dawza
Originally posted by: taltamir
SATA and IDE are commonly referred to as SSD rather then SATA flash or IDE flash. they all have wear leveling AFAIK.
Click to expand...

And your point is?
Click to expand...

Perhaps he's trying to say that the OCZ Throttle is an SSD and therefore has wear leveling, but it's never described as such and is instead marketed as a super-fast USB thumb drive that happens to have eSATA. It is not marketed as an SSD, therefore may not (probably doesn't?) have SSD considerations, like wear-leveling. If it had it, I would think that they would say so. I assume that the answer is "no" rather than try to define it or fit it into a previously existing category, but I don't see how they can ignore the obvious question for any high-capacity flash drive with an SATA interface.
 
a normal usb thumb drive will use mlc flash , i dont think any use slc. unless you plan to but an SLC pata / sata drive in a usb case. Maybe they would use SLC flash if they make like say a sandisk ultra IV usb drive (not sure if they make those, but all those ultra III / IV CF or SD memories are SLC)

it just isnt required because usb thumb drives are not expected to be written to enough times to matter.

wear leveling is handled in the controller so maybe the more advanced wear leveling algorithms arent on cheap thumb drives. i would figure even thumb drives probably have at least basic wear leveling (say they have 8 memory cells, write each bit on every 8th cell or something). I don't think its something you'd really need to worry about though.
 
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