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Table of Contents
Maximize the life of a USB Drive or other Solid State Memory
USB drives, can only be written to a limited number of times, normally thousands, and then they don't work.
The life of a USB drive, can be maximized, by minimizing the amount of writing to it.
Reading the drive, does not shorten it's life, only writing to it.
Some computers contain solid state internal drives, similar to usb drives. The same thing applies to these drives.
There are a number of things which can be done to maximize the life of these drives.
Don't put a Swap Partition on it
Never put a swap partition on a USB drive, as this results in a lot of writing to it, and will greatly shorten its life.
Use a Non-Journalling Filesystem
When installing Tiny Core, use the ext2 filesystem, this is not a journalling filesystem, and will minimize the amount of writing to the drive.
Use Backup, not Persistent home
When Tiny Core is run without persistent home, and a file is saved, it is saved to RAM. It is only written to the USB drive, when backup is run, normally when shutting down Tiny Core. For more information, see Backup or Persistent home and opt.
Use Persistent opt
If persistent opt is used on a USB drive, in most situations, it results in less writing to the usb drive. Most people change settings in opt, less often than they backup.
Make Extensions for Settings
If you have Tiny Core installed on a USB drive, using backup, and make extensions for settings and large files, you can have less in backup, which lengthens the life of the USB drive. For more information, see Make Extensions for Settings.
