Adjust Your File System To Accomodate Flash Drives

I am using a Compact Flash card for my root partition on a small Atom based server at home. I find this to be a good way to build an inexpensive, quiet, low powered server however it does introduce a few special problems due to the absence of any wear leveling logic as used by proper SSD hard drives.

I use a slot loaded CF card which makes it easy for me to pull the card to make an image (using dd) or swap over to another OS without unscrewing the case. However using Compact Flash or a plain old USB thumb drive might be cheap and handy but it also brings to head some issues related to how the system reads and writes to the card.

Flash memory is not happy about writing to the same memory cell over and over and over so consequently any cell that is treated in this manner will eventually die. Proper SSD's work around this by incorporating special logic that shifts sectors around automatically so that all the memory cell's do roughly the same amount of work. This is called "wear leveling". Dumb old Compact Flash cards don't do wear leveling but there are some steps we can take to ameliorate this problem to some degree.

These days most Linux systems use EXT3 or EXT4 file systems which are both journaling file systems. This means that every time a file is accessed the journal is updated to record that action. This makes it easier for the file-system to keep track of reads and writes and detect when an error may have occurred. Unfortunately it also means lots of writing (to the journal) which means a premature death for our CF card.

The older EXT2 FS does not do journaling which means we will have less protection but seeing that we are not using the CF to store data (just for the OS) I consider it an acceptable "risk".

To use EXT2 edit your fstab file;

vi /etc/fstab

On the line pertaining to your root (/) file-system change the "ext3" to "ext2", it's that simple.

Another thing that a normal system does is update each file every time it is read with a time-stamp. That's another thing we want to stop happening.

On the same line, find where it says errors=remount-ro and append to that column ,noatime.

Here is an example line;

UUID=68a316e0-8071-47e3-b31d-718a7be2e498 / ext2 errors=remount-ro,noatime 0 1

Another area that gets written to quite a bit is the /tmp directory.

We can move that off the Flash drive and into RAM using tmpfs. This has the bonus of improving overall system performance by a small amount.

Add this line to your fstab;

tmpfs /tmp tmpfs  size=256000m,exec,nosuid 0 0

You can tweak the amount of RAM to use but I wouldn't go below 128Mb personally.

And finally, once you install a normal hard disk to your server you should relocate your swap file over to a partition located on it. For now I am simply going to disable swap altogether. To do that just stick a comment "#" at the start of the relevant line.

And that's it, these changes should allow your "dumb" Flash drive based OS installation to live a reasonably long and happy life. My current server has been going strong for about 2 years now, fingers crossed!