Does boot and shutdown OMV will wear usb boot drive

  • Hi everybody,


    I successfully setup my OMV for a storage purpose. I would like to know what exactly will wear down flash drive faster. I read about it but only can understand a bit. However, will it wear down my falsh drive if I frequently shutdown and boot my OMV everyday? I will only boot it when I want to use Plex Media Server from my Nvidia Shield. Other than that, i will only use it to transfer a video from windows nettwork.


    My question, is it safe to use OMV like that rather than leave it ON 24/7?

    • Offizieller Beitrag

    Hi everybody,


    I successfully setup my OMV for a storage purpose. I would like to know what exactly will wear down flash drive faster. I read about it but only can understand a bit. However, will it wear down my falsh drive if I frequently shutdown and boot my OMV everyday? I will only boot it when I want to use Plex Media Server from my Nvidia Shield. Other than that, i will only use it to transfer a video from windows nettwork.


    My question, is it safe to use OMV like that rather than leave it ON 24/7?

    As I recall, *typically* it's the amount of logging that OMV does.


    Is it safe? Of course it is. The server doesn't have to be on 24/7, many just do out of convenience... The flash drive is still going to wear though while you're watching movies and moving files.


    Did you install the flash-memory plugin? It was designed to resolve this. Many moons ago, before the flash-memory plugin, I nuked a flash drive install in about 3 weeks. That server was typically "on" about 10-12hrs a day.


    Not sure if that helps any

  • Did you install the flash-memory plugin? It was designed to resolve this. Many moons ago, before the flash-memory plugin, I nuked a flash drive install in about 3 weeks. That server was typically "on" about 10-12hrs a day.

    Thank you for your reply. Yes I did install that plugin. I will monitor and see how this going.

    • Offizieller Beitrag

    Thank you for your reply. Yes I did install that plugin. I will monitor and see how this going.

    If that plugin is installed and setup properly... there's probably very little concern in what you're doing (at least in my totally uninformed opinion.. :) ).

    • Offizieller Beitrag

    I would like to know what exactly will wear down flash drive faster. I read about it but only can understand a bit.


    Excessive flash media wear is caused by "write amplification". Entries and other performance data may be written into log files, in a single line entry, that can be as small as 50 bytes. The problem with flash media is, a write (any write) requires the full use at least one "writable block". A writable block may be between 4K to 8K. This contributes to "write amplification". A write, no matter how small, requires 4K to 8K minimum. This affects all flash media, to include SSD's.

    1000's of small entries are being written to log and performance files, stored on the boot drive, on a regular basis. These writes are greatly magnified by X10, X100 or even more (write amplification) when stored in a fixed sized writable blocks.

    Flash media life is determined by how many erase / write cycles a writable block can withstand until it goes "read-only". (Read operations do not cause wear. Only write.) The flash device used will attempt to "level" erase / write wear by writing free blocks sequentially, from beginning to end, so wear is spread throughout the writable range. Once the full range has been written, the process starts at the beginning again. This prevents one location from being written, repeatedly, to failure. With 1000's of writes, consuming 4 to 8K minimum, the flash device will write all available blocks rapidly. Soon (depending on a hand full of factors) the device will cycle through the writable range, repeatedly, until blocks fail and go "ready-only".

    The flashmemory plugin stores log file writes using folder2ram. This is a kind of selective ram disk that temporarily stores the small writes to log files (in /var/log, var/tmp, and others) in ram. On shutdown, folder2ram flushes this data to the flash device. This works well because numerous small writes are consolidated into one larger write, reducing write wear by a factor of X10 or more.

    In the bottom line, you should be fine. I have a USB boot drive that is over 4 years old. On the other hand, to be safe, you should consider backing up your USB boot drive. One process for doing that is -> here.

  • Thank you for your details explanation. I curious see to how long the boot can last for basic usage like me. Also curious to see how many write it need just for shutdown and boot. Thank you for the link. I will look on it.

Jetzt mitmachen!

Sie haben noch kein Benutzerkonto auf unserer Seite? Registrieren Sie sich kostenlos und nehmen Sie an unserer Community teil!