Reliable Flash drive for OS?

[Tipnmo101]

Looking for recommendations on a reliable flash drive to boot and run an OS off of.

A bit of background, this is for a retrofitted point of sale system, and the supplied drives from the vendor die every 3-6 months. The point of sales are used continuously 12 hours a day, 7 days a week.

It might be that the read/write demand is just too much for a thumb drive, but if anyone has any input on a flash drive that has been reliable in a similar environment, it would be greatly appreciated.

 

[Pick2]

What size Flash Drive ? If the POS system will take a bigger drive , it will probably last longer. If it is exceeding it write cycle life , doubling the size should almost double it's life.

 

[Elixer]

They do make 1TB USB flash drives....
Though, you need to know which the specs of the PoS in question, and if it can handle that, if it is USB 2 or 3, and the size that will actually fit in.
For all we know, it could be a proprietary connector.

 

[lxskllr]

3-6 months doesn't sound bad to me. I'd look into a bulk purchase of whatever, and change them every two months. As long as you aren't using huge drives, the expense would be trivial for a business application.

edit:
You could get drives branded with the store name. When you take them out of rotation, zero fill them, then give them to customers/clients.

 

[corkyg]

Well, I have a Lexar Firefly, 20GB, that has been in use on my personal keyring for at least 7 years. I have two copies of it, but have never had any problems.

 

[Tipnmo101]

More info: USB 2, 16 gb drives (6.4gb used), linux based (2.6 i believe).

https://www.amazon.com/Kingston-Digital-16GB-DataTraveler-DTMCK/dp/B007V9U81E

What size Flash Drive ? If the POS system will take a bigger drive , it will probably last longer. If it is exceeding it write cycle life , doubling the size should almost double it's life.

The bigger drive is an interesting idea, although would the same blocks receive the same wear even on a bigger drive?

3-6 months doesn't sound bad to me. I'd look into a bulk purchase of whatever, and change them every two months. As long as you aren't using huge drives, the expense would be trivial for a business application.

If we don't find a more reliable drive, this is what we will end up doing

 

[Elixer]

The point of a bigger drive would be that the flash drive has extra room to spread the wear out more evenly. So, if you are only going to be using 32GB max, then it makes sense to use 256/512GB or even 1 TB flash drives to get longer use out of them.

 

[Tipnmo101]

The point of a bigger drive would be that the flash drive has extra room to spread the wear out more evenly. So, if you are only going to be using 32GB max, then it makes sense to use 256/512GB or even 1 TB flash drives to get longer use out of them.

And I could see that in a desktop environment, but with this use, as a POS terminal, i am not sure there would be a more distributed wear. These drives use 6.4 of 16 gb, and do not grow. There are probably some temp files that get created and deleted, but I would suspect most of the writing is done to existing files, and since it is ext4, that the same blocks would be used. Still might be worth trying, got any recommendations a good drive?

 

[Elixer]

And I could see that in a desktop environment, but with this use, as a POS terminal, i am not sure there would be a more distributed wear. These drives use 6.4 of 16 gb, and do not grow. There are probably some temp files that get created and deleted, but I would suspect most of the writing is done to existing files, and since it is ext4, that the same blocks would be used. Still might be worth trying, got any recommendations a good drive?

It is done by the drive's CPU, has nothing to do with the OS.
In fact, the OS has no clue at how the NAND controller moves things around.

 

[VirtualLarry]

External USB3.0 256/512GB SSD?

Sure, much more expensive, but should (?!) last 5-10 years.

 

[Mike64]

Idle speculation: have you ever done (or had someone else do) a post-mortem analysis to determine why the drives die? Given that those tiny little drives are (in general) pretty notorious for overheating with frequent/continuous usage, I'm just wondering if the drives are dying because their write capacity is in fact being exceeded, or if it's due to the controller circuitry giving out even before that happens? If that is the problem (and if a physically larger drive would be practical given whatever your space constraints are), that might help, too...

 

[XavierMace]

Without knowing the read/write load of the drives, it's kinda hard to really give much of a recommendation. That said, I've been running San Disk Ultra Fit's as boot drives in my servers for many years. I've only had 1 die so far. But those have a pretty minimal read/write load on them.

https://www.amazon.com/SanDisk-Ultra-SDCZ43-032G-GAM46-Newest-Version/dp/B01BGTG41W/

 

[Smoblikat]

Would an external HDD be an option?

http://www.bestbuy.com/site/wd-easy...gQjqCbngxUlfZpEgFhs-5FMIuQjfGxpnJzxoCFcvw_wcB

That one is pretty slim and doesnt require an extra power connector.

 

[deustroop]

RAID ?
(j/k)

 

[XavierMace]

External drive on a POS system just sounds like it's asking for trouble to me. Also wouldn't surprise me if that's not PCI compliant.

 

[PliotronX]

I think I would use one of these with a couple 250GB drives because I know how much of a pain downtime with POS is.

 

[deustroop]

OP came in looking for a reliable flash drive to boot and run an OS off of. Each reply post has upped the hardware requirement. Soon, someone'll suggest a server farm, just in case.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Soon, someone'll suggest a server farm, just in case.

Maybe not a "farm" of them, but possibly a server could work, IF the clients can PXE boot. That would solve the need for physical boot devices entirely. But it could make boot times longer, and could prove to be a single point of failure, that if the boot server was down, then ALL of the POS systems might not be able to boot, instead of individual failures.

 

[cbn]

This problem sounds similar to one experienced by Open Media vault users where the OS writes lots of little files to the usb drive (containing the OS) and they wear out fast. (Open Media vault does not recommend a regular usb drive because of this)

Best course of action (if a usb drive is needed for OS) would be to get a usb drive with a SSD controller in it:

https://www.amazon.com/SanDisk-Extreme-Flash-Drive-SDCZ80-032G-GAM46/dp/B00KT7DXIU

(SSD controller = wear leveling)

 

[PliotronX]

OP came in looking for a reliable flash drive to boot and run an OS off of. Each reply post has upped the hardware requirement. Soon, someone'll suggest a server farm, just in case.

If its one thing I have learned working with corporate systems, half assing things leads to trouble down the road. How many dead flash drives and downtime costs less than an enclosure and two measly spinners? As xaviermace mentioned, if there is any record of payment information stored on the drives especially unencrypted, that is trouble waiting to happen as well. Cbn probably has the right idea while your reply was the least helpful.