Hard or flash drive ?

Got a dockstar to run squeezebox server out of a 3 partitions hard drive. It runs better than my 800€ win7 4gb dual core ! Crazy isn't it ?
Now i wonder ... The more i read on the web the more i get confused...

Is it better to boot from a usb flash stick rather than from a disk ?
Performance wise is it better ?
Or is it only for spinning down the drive When unused ?
If yes, is it possible that squeezebox server leaves its media lib untouched long enougth for the dtive to power down ?
How do you connect a flash drive to the mini-usb (/sda) connector ? Or should i use another usb port ? If yes, how does jeff's script find out what drive to format at install time then ?
Is it ok to have a swap on a flash drive ?

Thanks for all your good work



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 11/03/2010 05:52PM by Reniera.

> How do you connect a flash drive to the mini-usb (/sda) connector ?
USB A-Female to Mini USB 5-Pin Female Adapter but any port is fine since as of 10/3 Jeff's installer now sets up scanning all 4 ports for the boot drive.

> If yes, how does jeff's script find out what drive to format at install time then ?
I always do installs with a single drive connected, the target drive only.

> Is it ok to have a swap on a flash drive ?
Depends on who you ask it seems. Flash drives do have wear leveling & some die from other causes before their flash wear lifetime is up. Heres a thread on this question
Depending on what your dockstar is used for it may rarely touch swap. Personally If my dockstar uses swap a lot then I would avoid swap on a flash drive if possible.



Edited 6 time(s). Last edit at 11/03/2010 09:40PM by Twi.

I benchmarked my USB flash stick and my USB-2 harddrive. Flash is faster for random access, harddrive faster for sustained. So I'd say your OS will run faster on flash but use harddrive for storing large files.
I have a 2GB USB flash and a 500GB USB harddrive attached, boots off the USB stick (it would NOT boot off the harddrive) but by time the mounts are occuring, it will see the harddrive and I have mount points in my /etc/fstab for the USB harddrive.
Currently I have a small swap on the harddrive and then a swap on the flash, so if its swapping like crazy its getting the speed improvement of 2 storage mediums.
I left Jeff's /etc/fstab as-is for its use of /dev/sda2 and just put another swap on the /etc/rc.local

swapon -p1 /mnt/SG500G/swap

This places the harddrive higher priority as seen by

$ sudo swapon -s
Filename                                Type            Size    Used    Priority

/dev/sda2                               partition       361452  0       -1
/mnt/SG500G/swap                        file            327672  65644   1