Your Chosen Boot Method

[chris_c]

No reason particularly for the poll other than general interest

I boot from SD because I like a virgin fallback and also don't mind wearing out a cheap SD card but would be mortified if I wore out my Nand

 

[Prometheus]

I boot from the NAND. I figure that it's there to be used, so I may as well use it (and also take advantage of having two SD Card slots that I can do anything with). I don't mess with very much, so I'm not worried about tweaking things and messing it up.

 

[Caine]

I boot from harddisk (i.e. on my desktop) as I still haven't received my Pandora yet.

If I do ever get it (chances are decreasing rapidly), then I will boot from SD card (developer/programmer).

 

[chris_c]

If I do ever get it (chances are decreasing rapidly)

I don't think that's fair every indication is that production is coming on nicely and I'll go further and say I reckon that if batch one are not done for Christmas then they will be shortly after (that xmas 2010 )

What is it that give you reason to think "chances are decreasing rapidly" ?

 

[Caine]

What is it that give you reason to think "chances are decreasing rapidly" ?

Ah sorry, maybe I should have clarified that. 1st of January 2011 is my cutoff date.

 

[Dead1nside]

I'm not too convinced by this NAND wear. I've never had flash memory die on me. Of course, I wouldn't want to wear out the NAND because it's irreplaceable so it's great to have the option to boot from SD. Do you notice any speed decrease by booting from SD? Also, I think as long as you're not saving config files, app data or /tmp to the NAND then it's going to remain pretty static between firmware upgrades.

 

[Tempel]

I'm not too convinced by this NAND wear. I've never had flash memory die on me.

I totally agree with you, but that's not why I (intend to) boot from SD. I'd probably have an SD card in there constantly anyways, so having root there allows me to monkey around with the internals (including installing Angstrom packages directly) without fear for space. Also, it allows me to easily reboot into a clean environment for testing purposes. Of course, I could reverse that approach and have a clean-boot SD, but then I don't get the space bonus.

 

[zx-81]

i boot from nand, but after the boot process, i'm using several chroot linux image on my SD (for dev/testing etc ...)

 

[chris_c]

I'm not too convinced by this NAND wear. I've never had flash memory die on me. Of course, I wouldn't want to wear out the NAND because it's irreplaceable so it's great to have the option to boot from SD. Do you notice any speed decrease by booting from SD? Also, I think as long as you're not saving config files, app data or /tmp to the NAND then it's going to remain pretty static between firmware upgrades.

You honestly never broke a USB stick or SD card, I know I have several cards I've had increasing bad blocks and then complete failure of the device, for sure now a days flash media does tend to be more robust, and I think you'll probably need a few years of hard use to see problems on internal flash - its an issue to consider but its not a major major issue. Oh and the major issue is repeated *writes* you can read nand till ya blue in the face without damage... This is why the majority of embedded devices use ram based tmpfs for logs and other files that are repeatedly written to.