Is now the time to dump your laptop hard drive for flash media?

Back in the days before the Thin Puppy's CF card died, I was running my Maxspeed Maxterm thin client with flash memory instead of a conventional hard drive. And since Puppy Linux takes great care NOT to write to flash very often, the media is supposed to last virtually forever. Why mine died is a mystery, but it wasn't due to wear (more likely I killed it with static electricity).

Now that I'm running Puppy 2.16 (new to me this week!), I've been thinking about going back to flash for this thin-client box -- I'm booting from CD and also have a regular-sized 14 GB hard drive connected outside the box (yes, I truly am thinking outside the box -- or my PC is).

But the conventional wisdom is that for "normal" operating systems that don't use RAM disks, you'll kill flash quickly with the constant writes required by the OS.

But today on Low End Mac, that question didn't come up for these guys who are running their Mac laptops from flash memory. That link was to the letters about this original article, which, in turn, refers to this article about doing it with a Powerbook 1400 (one of which I have ... but which is too frustrating at this point to even contemplate using for my everyday computing for reasons that have nothing to do with flash). This final article -- filled with woe about flash cards that didn't work with the 1400 -- does address longevity of the flash media, saying it should work for "years and years."

I'm going to try it again (maybe even with Debian), but I'm also going to back up all my data ...

And again, if you want to boot from flash but are nervous, give the new Puppy 2.16 a try. I'm in my first full day of use, but so far all is going very, very well.