Last month I wrote about using USB flash storage devices for my firewall and Squid proxy [1]. 4 days ago it failed, the USB device used for the root filesystem stopped accepting write requests. The USB device which is used for /var/spool/squid is still going well after almost 5 months of intensive use while the USB device for the root filesystem failed after 24 days of light use. Both USB devices were of the same model and were obtained at the same time. Presumably one of them was just defective.
I’m now using an old 1G USB device for the root filesystem. When using it on less ancient systems with USB 2.0 there was an obvious speed difference between the 1GB and 4GB devices. But when run on USB 1.2 they can both support the maximum speed of the port so performance probably isn’t any worse. Not that it really matters for the root filesystem, the server is supposed to run without a break for long periods of time so if boot time becomes a performance issue then whatever is causing the reboots will be a much bigger problem.
It’s annoying to have a device fail and the failure rate for USB flash devices running 24*7 is looking rather bad at the moment. But I’m confident that things will run well from now on.