Puppy kills USB flash in 34 days?? (Nope!)

[PaulBx1]

I was reading about how puppy works, and noticed Barry says with pupmode 13 the flash is written every 30 seconds. Is that right?

I recall reading somewhere flash devices can take on the order of 100,000 writes. So that means a flash would take 30x100,000=3,000,000 seconds to die under Puppy. That is 3,000,000/60=50,000 minutes, or 50,000/60=833 hours, or 833/24=34 days. Not very long, if you leave the machine on all the time.

Does this process stop when the computer goes into standby? I suppose so, which would certainly stretch it out quite a bit.

Can the interval for writing flash be adjusted? 30 seconds seems awfully short.

Also, on a separate subject, I am running in pupmode 12. If I simply copy my pup_save.3fs from the hard drive to flash, and delete the copy on the hard drive, will it then run automatically as pupmode 13 - even though I'm booting either off CD, or from the hard drive? I suppose I could just try it, but I don't want to lose anything...

[BarryK]

No, it's every 30 minutes.
The script that does it is /usr/sbin/savepuppyd

[PaulBx1]

Aah, I thought that might be an error. It's in the 2nd paragraph after the 3-color graphic of pupmode 13.

[BarryK]

Ah, thanks, I fixed it.

[billstclair]

So that should mean 60 * 34 days to do 100,000 writes. That's 5.5 years. I still think it's worthwhile to fix the code to avoid writing when the input file is already copied, which is most of the time. I did this with rsync for Puppy 1. It's on my list of low-priority things to do for Puppy 2.