So you are talking about a USB connected 2.5" sata disk it seems?  We are in the process of putting 16GB usb sticks in some of the machines.  Eventually, maybe all.  A few of the boards we have are problematic, such as the origen.  Still others, such as the snowball, have bugs with USB that would surely bite us here.  Also, since most (all?) of these boards don't have an option to boot off of USB, it wouldn't get us any closer to bootloader testing.

The one possible good thing with it, however, is that we could skip dealing with an extra 2 partitions, have a normal partition layout, and even maybe use LMC/LAMC to write the images, from the master image itself - thus distributing the lmc load to the actual boards which would be ideal.  For that reason alone, it might be worth considering.  However we should first make sure of a few things.
1. that the current swath of boards will support it reasonably well (this is iffy right now because of origen/snowball)
2. that we are reasonably safe for future, known/expected boards (I have this nagging feeling that as soon as we did something like this, some new member would join with a board that lacks usb... or *is* a usb stick - cotton candy anyone?)
3. we should make sure that this doesn't interfere with dev platforms usb testing schemes.  Currently we're adding those usb sticks so that they can test on usb - not run off usb.

Thanks,
Paul Larson

On Fri, Jan 27, 2012 at 7:33 AM, Zygmunt Krynicki <zygmunt.krynicki@linaro.org> wrote:
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

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