Persistent /home on flash drive: How to avoid burn-out?

[Capricorny]

I have set up a peristent /home on a flash drive, but I can foresee a problem: Because the image is updated all the time with cache/temp/conf-files, the flash drive will not last very long with intensive system use. (Typically, 10000 writes are guaranteed.) Is there a (relatively simple) way to have /home on a ramdisk, but reading from an image on boot, and updating that image on shutdown?

[Béèm]

Just a side question.
Where did you find the info about max writes.
I checked some brands and they are amazingly silent about such a figure.

[Capricorny]

TwinMOS gives data for USB pendrive here (min 10 000 r/w): http://www.twinmos.com/flash/flash_p_usb20_md_s1.htm
And for SD/USB combo here("min 100 000 erase cycles"): http://www.twinmos.com/flash/flash_p_usd2.htm

As many have experienced, flash drives may burn out fairly quickly if they are used as ordinary RAM, or a write-intensive harddisk.

[Béèm]

Thank you, that's disturbing news.
I wonder why this is as at first sight I don't see a technical reason.
For CD/DVD RW there is a limit but there is a technical reason.
Puzzled.

[malaire]

I have set up a peristent /home on a flash drive, but I can foresee a problem: Because the image is updated all the time with cache/temp/conf-files, the flash drive will not last very long with intensive system use. (Typically, 10000 writes are guaranteed.) Is there a (relatively simple) way to have /home on a ramdisk, but reading from an image on boot, and updating that image on shutdown?

I don't know if this helps at all, but Puppy Linux seems to have solved this problem.
You can read more about that from How Puppy works

Still, this might be far too difficult to implement in Knoppix.

[Capricorny]

I don't know if this helps at all, but Puppy Linux seems to have solved this problem.
You can read more about that from How Puppy works
Still, this might be far too difficult to implement in Knoppix.

Thanks for the links! It should not be too difficult to do in Knoppix, and I wonder if something like this is not already in use.

[Béèm]

Using Puppy Linux as well, I asked the question here: http://www.murga.org/%7Epuppy/viewtopic.php?t=10988
So in Puppy Linux, there isn't much activity on the save (persistent home) file at first sight.

[Béèm]

The thread I referenced in my previous post here has been updated.
Also this http://www.puppyos.com/development/howpuppyworks.html gives a nice overview of Puppy Linux's architecture