Porteus

But holy mother of god!

I DO NOT WANT EXFAT! In Porteus I want Ext4, nothing else!

Again, for those who are way to lazy to actually read what I wrote above:
- I only formatted the stick with exFAT in order to be able to test the stick
with the h2test-util, under windows!

And since that test went through just fine I zeroed the whole stick with dd
and thereafter had no problem creating a Ext4-filesystem on the stick.

There, everyone GOT THAT???

Microsoft can take their proprietary filesystems and utilize them as suppositories.

But, back to topic:

Here's what I believe is the reason behind my "stalls":
http://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=40441
http://www.anandtech.com/show/2738/6
http://lwn.net/Articles/428584/

Since I've definitely found out what the problem was, I thought I'll
better write about it here in order to "close" this "issue" for good.

First of all, even if USB-sticks are capable of storing several megabytes
per second, this is NOT a number one should have in mind when
looking at IRL-performance. And especially not when running an OS
from the stick in question.

Even if you might get scores around 20-60MBytes/sec when you're
benchmarking, this value only tells you how the flash-memory performs
1. when storing large files onto it.
2. when the data-packets are somewhat organized to be nicely lined up
on the flash-memory.
3. when the flash-cells in best case are absolutely new.

The big problem I've experienced, is that once I want to write two files to
the stick at once, or for some other reason make many small writes after
another (such as when downloading a torrent etc), is that the stick simply
over and over again runs out of cells which it can write to directly.

Flash is NOT like a magnetic storage. For a flash-device to be able
to write to one of it's free cells, that cell has to be wiped of its old data first.
And that takes quite a bit more time than to just read data from it.
Which is why writing to a flash-memory generally is much slower than
reading from it. AND why SSD's and flash in general gets slower once you
start filling it up with data. (sooner or later the memory runs out of free
cells and has to start wiping old cells clean of their data, which is what I
experience as "stalls". Because when this is happening on really cheap
flash-devices, such as my USB-stick, the stick cannot process any other
data at all. Which means the computer has to stop for several seconds)

I've thought about buying a Sandisk Extreme 64GB 3.0-stick (because
that stick has an built-in flash-controller, which makes the whole stick
much much faster), but it's just not worth the extra cash I'd have
to spend on it. I can organize my downloads a bit, and thereby try to go
easy on the USB-stick instead.

By the way, for all those of you that are into 8 bit chip-music, and other
electronical stuff, have a look at this (completely legal) torrent:

Magnet:
magnet:?xt=urn:btih:5SY3ZGMUOAUXEQZBBJCQHI4PDVPPXLDZ&dn=Best_of_8_Bit_Collective_(8bc)_%5b06-2006_to_06-2011%5d&tr=http%3a%2f%2flegittorrents.info%3a2710%2fannounce

All goes to confirm the accumulated Wisdom of the Net (as is to be understood):

1. No swap partition/file on USB stick.
2. Read-Only files on ext2 FS (iso, or in this case XZMs). Will also save space, as don't really need journalling i/o overhead.
3. Big files, like movie files on ext2 FS.
4. Avoid magic folders on USB, if folders are going to take i/o hammering.
5. Lastly, of course, run in ram cpy2ram (myself given up presistence).

Somewhat perplexed by current fad to run entire os/distro off usb. Mind you though, when hdd gave up the ghost, ran entire Kanotix installation from 4GB usb, swap partition and all (before hearing of usb swap degradation). Slow, but never stalled, and got job done. Duplicated on another 4GB usb, but this pretty soon gave errors, got it replaced and no problem thereafter. To this day both usb sticks still usable. Both Verbatim.

Bogomips wrote:Somewhat perplexed by current fad to run entire os/distro off usb.

1. Portability. Can be run on home pc, friend's pc, family's pc, school's pc, work's pc, vacation pc, hotel pc, etc.

2. Can be run with removable drive recovery systems. Windows 8 Recovery USB, Windows 7 Recovery USB, Acer Recovery, etc.

Bogomips wrote:Somewhat perplexed by current fad to run entire os/distro off usb.

Security: imagine walking into an Internet-café, rebooting a computer with your USB-stick and from there
you're able to run whatever programs you like without anyone using any keyloggers, trojans, or even any
network-surveilance-programs (such as VNC). to capture your credit-card-info, checking your surfing-habits
or whatever.

I once walked into a certain café where the owner were constanty monitoring what everyone were doing
online. He did it all from behind his counter. Just out of pure habit I pressed CTRL+ESC and got up the
taskmanager, saw "VNC" running, tried to kill the damn thing - which resulted in windows rebooting the
computer... And as I understood what was happening and why the system had been configured in that
way I left that café. (but not before loudly telling the asshole-café-owner what a fascist pig he was)

So, security or privacy are my two strongest reasons for why I use Porteus.
(I find running Tor from Porteus on USB is a lot simpler than doing the same on Win. Unless of course you're
allowed to install your own utils on the computer in question)