Install Raspian on ext3 USB stick

Well, a USB stick is the same sort of flash media as an SD card, so you won't solve that problem. I use a spinning disk for my server Pi, it's a

2.5" portable disk powered by the USB port, max_usb_current=1 in /boot/config.txt. Works well, haven't had an outage in years.

That's what I do as well. My 1 TB portable disk only pulls 500 mA, so I don't even need max_usb_current=1.

To mitigate peak currents I do use a short (15 cm or 30 cm) USB cable with just the power wires (18 AWG, they say) between the power adapter and the Pi. Result: Never a yellow lightning bolt in the top right corner of the HDMI display. The capacitors in the Pi just aren't big enough to serve as a power reservoir.

Search "15cm 0.5FT Micro B USB Fast Quick Charge Cable 2.1A Android SmartPhone 18AWG" on eBay.

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Regards, 
Kees Nuyt

ext3 is still a journalling FS - you need ext2 to get rid of journalling.

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Martin    | martin at 
Gregorie  | gregorie dot org

Some USB sticks, particularly the tiny low profile ones, may be pretty much the same as an SD card when used as a Pi filing system. Some of the larger sticks *may* have better controllers for improved wear levelling and resilience when used as a Pi filing system.

I've been using a Samsung USB3 bar drive on one of my Pi's for over 3 years without a problem, where as the maximum an SD card has lasted is

18 months. My main Pi is using a proper SSD with a USB to SATA adaptor.

---druck

On a sunny day (Sat, 31 Mar 2018 12:42:00 +0100) it happened druck wrote in :

I think it depends a lot on the application. One of my old Pies that drives a big wall-clock and uses some - I don't who made it - old SDcard

has been running about 18 hours a day from 2013.

As it does not normally write data that is logical I think. An other pi here is from 2014 and runs 24/7 and does a lot of logging to a normal 16 GB SDcard, writes every few seconds. So where does that leave us?

Important is backups. I just dd the SDcards every now and then, mostly after I made changes, to a big harddisk.

So, compared to the lifetime of modern electronic devices... those FLASH memories are not so bad.

I have had a pi, for about 5 years, running 24/7, controlling my central heating, and maintaining a RRD database of temperature readings every 2 minutes, which is still using its original SD. I have had a clone of the SD on standby, ready to slot in when it dies, but there has never been any need.

Ive just looked at my desktop kingston SATA SSD and its done 24000 hours to date and passed all tests ands has 96% of it's life left

That looks like it might last 20 years. Way better than any hard disk.

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"When one man dies it's a tragedy. When thousands die it's statistics." 

Josef Stalin

You may well be right. The stuff I come across and use tends to be brand name cards in USB adaptors and cheap no-name sticks, so my expectation tends to be the other way round.

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