Optimizing Linux with cheap flash drives

[Lobster]

I am not sure of this is relevant
for people with low ram or other resources.
Mostly Puppy is designed to go into and run from ram
what of the boot source . . .

It may trigger some ideas, especially for developers
http://lwn.net/Articles/428584/

[nooby]

I get the notion that them are talking about flash drives that one use to replace HDD so one instead have SSD while when I think of a Flash drive I think of small USB memory Pendrives or Thumbs or Memstick or even SD cards in an adapter or you have them in a Smartphone. These are smaller than a thumb while the text you links to talk about drives that are 2.5" or something

But I guess the text is important because it will get more and more popular I guess when them go low in price.

[nitehawk]

I find flash drives super-handy for "backup" of files. That way,....when I do a complete install (or re-install) of a distro,.........I usually have a bunch of my most important files and apps right on a flash drive. This includes wallpapers, firefox bookmarks, plugins, etc. etc.

[Aitch]

Another use of cheap pen/flashdrives, is in a powered [yes, powered seem more reliable in my experience] USB 2.0 hub and setup as a raid for a combined fast access drive

Experiments I did with some cheap 1gb drives yielded times iro 32Mb/s...similar to the speed from an OCZ rally2, but without the cost!
Makes a very fast swap partition for any OS

see http://bigbruin.com/reviews05/thumbraid_1

The recommended raid software is mdadm, which seems to have been abandoned in 2004.....but there are probably others

see https://raid.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Linux_Raid

Aitch