Hi guys.
This is just a note, perhaps we'll be able to go down this route (eventually) perhaps it will never be viable. SD cards are utter crap. USB disks are fantastic. I'm currently recovering my home server that died yesterday night due to a bad SD card. Luckily I kept the image as l-m-c would crash attempting to write it to my SD card adapter.
Now I'm just finishing the final configuration bits (sadly those parts were lost with that card) and came to realize how painless and efficient a simple USB disk is. Would it be possible to change our deployment to use SD _just_ to store a recovery uboot and recovery kernel? Could we try to stick the master rootfs and test rootfs (and all those android partitions) directly on the HDD?
PS: Apart from just working, it seems that current kernels have a big issue with very slow storage (like thumb drives and sd cards) and transparent huge tables. I cannot say it is directly the case on my iMX53 but "idle" system load on a regular SD card was around 4-5 (writing to syslog, keeping up with small squid traffic of my home users) while the same system, with the same set of services on a run off the mill 2.5" HDD can barely climb above 0.5.
Best regards ZK