Images partitioned right? Good USB drives? (Re: Woodhouse on flash storage)

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On Tue, Oct 6, 2009 at 3:10 AM, Mitch Bradley <wmb at laptop.org> wrote:

> b) If you must construct a fixed partition layout for use on multiple
> different devices, align each partition on at least a 4MiB boundary.
> That means that you "waste" 4M for the partition map (one 512-byte
> sector padded out to a 4 MiB boundary, but oh well).  For devices 2 GiB
> or less - the previous generation - maybe 1 MiB alignment would be okay,
> as such devices are likely to have smaller erase blocks.  Those numbers
> seem "safe" to me.

1.
Do the F11 / SoaS "overwrite your USB/SD device" XO images follow this
guideline?
   cat soas??xo.2gremovable.tar.lzma | lzma -dc - | tar xf - -O > /dev/sdX

(The way a boot image is created and distributed as multiple
monolithic 379+ MB files seems crazy -- surely it's just a collection
of files, tweaks to the existing MBR, and some disk partitioning and
FS layout requirements.  But that's a different discussion. ;-) )

2.
The old Fedora 10 on XO project specifically recommended SanDisk
Extreme III SD cards.  Can anyone suggest generally-good brands of USB
flash drives?

(I have a cheap USB flash drive that has "gone crazy" after two
/dev/sdb reblastings; often usb-creator leaves it in a bizarre state
and dosfsck reports hundreds of errors it can't repair.  Weird.)

Thanks for all you do!

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