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USB Flash Memory for boot/system. What is fast enough?

  

 
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aclose at gmail

Nov 22, 2009, 2:59 PM

Post #1 of 19 (902 views)
Permalink
USB Flash Memory for boot/system. What is fast enough?
i'm planning out a Zotac IONITX-B-E Atom N230 FE and am looking to
boot/run off of a USB stick. what speed is fast enough to limit any
hiccups during playback/menu navigation? i wouldn't think it would be
a huge deal since the USB stick will just contain the OS and FE while
all content would be coming over the wire, but i've seen mention of
slow USB sticks causing issues.
most of the sticks i've looked at list their speed at 200x, but what
does that mean? i've only seen a few that have any r/w performance
listed. any thoughts/suggestions?

Newegg has the Zotac IONITX-B-E Atom N230 listed at ~$135 with a $35
rebate right now.

--
Andrew Close
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redpepperracing at gmail

Nov 22, 2009, 3:56 PM

Post #2 of 19 (876 views)
Permalink
Re: USB Flash Memory for boot/system. What is fast enough? [In reply to]
On Sun, Nov 22, 2009 at 5:59 PM, Andrew Close <aclose [at] gmail> wrote:
> i'm planning out a Zotac IONITX-B-E Atom N230 FE and am looking to
> boot/run off of a USB stick.  what speed is fast enough to limit any
> hiccups during playback/menu navigation?  i wouldn't think it would be
> a huge deal since the USB stick will just contain the OS and FE while
> all content would be coming over the wire, but i've seen mention of
> slow USB sticks causing issues.
> most of the sticks i've looked at list their speed at 200x, but what
> does that mean?  i've only seen a few that have any r/w performance
> listed. any thoughts/suggestions?
>
> Newegg has the Zotac IONITX-B-E Atom N230 listed at ~$135 with a $35
> rebate right now.

I use OCZ Rally2 8GB drives with my Zotac IONITX-C, and have not had
any issues. Not sure what they are rated at speed wise, but they seem
to work fine.

Tom
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stichnot at gmail

Nov 23, 2009, 6:22 AM

Post #3 of 19 (854 views)
Permalink
Re: USB Flash Memory for boot/system. What is fast enough? [In reply to]
On Sun, Nov 22, 2009 at 2:59 PM, Andrew Close <aclose [at] gmail> wrote:
> i'm planning out a Zotac IONITX-B-E Atom N230 FE and am looking to
> boot/run off of a USB stick.  what speed is fast enough to limit any
> hiccups during playback/menu navigation?  i wouldn't think it would be
> a huge deal since the USB stick will just contain the OS and FE while
> all content would be coming over the wire, but i've seen mention of
> slow USB sticks causing issues.
> most of the sticks i've looked at list their speed at 200x, but what
> does that mean?  i've only seen a few that have any r/w performance
> listed. any thoughts/suggestions?

My experience is that you need to worry about more than the "up to
200x" or whatever rating the manufacturer gives.

My first USB stick had some sort of bulk write problem. If I did too
much sustained writing, I would get an I/O error and Linux would stop
recognizing the drive until I reinserted it. This is clearly a
problem if you're trying to install the OS onto the USB stick or clone
an existing OS.

My second USB stick was fine for bulk writes, but had some other sort
of problem. During myth playback, every 5-30 minutes or so, playback
(and presumably the whole system as well) would pause for a couple
seconds. I tried cloning it back to a hard drive and it ran
flawlessly for a week, so I'm certain it was a problem with the USB
stick.

For my third stick, I decided to choose something with hundreds of
high Newegg ratings. This led me to the "Patriot Xporter XT Boost"
line, which was rock solid for as long as I used it. I recommend the
8GB size. 4GB was enough for me, until I started installing this
package and that, until it pushed a little over 4GB.

By the way, be sure to use the "noatime" option when mounting file
systems on the USB stick. Otherwise every file that is opened, even
for reading, will actually involve another write to the file system.

Of course, in the spirit of ION systems and minimalism, your next step
is obviously to set up your system for net-booting. :) How to do this
may be obvious to many or well-documented elsewhere, but I documented
my own experience on this list.
http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/mythtv/users/391239

Jim
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beww at beww

Nov 23, 2009, 6:48 AM

Post #4 of 19 (853 views)
Permalink
Re: USB Flash Memory for boot/system. What is fast enough? [In reply to]
On Monday 23 November 2009 07:22:13 Jim Stichnoth wrote:
> On Sun, Nov 22, 2009 at 2:59 PM, Andrew Close <aclose [at] gmail> wrote:
> > i'm planning out a Zotac IONITX-B-E Atom N230 FE and am looking to
> > boot/run off of a USB stick.  what speed is fast enough to limit any
> > hiccups during playback/menu navigation?  i wouldn't think it would be
> > a huge deal since the USB stick will just contain the OS and FE while
> > all content would be coming over the wire, but i've seen mention of
> > slow USB sticks causing issues.
> > most of the sticks i've looked at list their speed at 200x, but what
> > does that mean?  i've only seen a few that have any r/w performance
> > listed. any thoughts/suggestions?
>
> My experience is that you need to worry about more than the "up to
> 200x" or whatever rating the manufacturer gives.
>
> My first USB stick had some sort of bulk write problem. If I did too
> much sustained writing, I would get an I/O error and Linux would stop
> recognizing the drive until I reinserted it. This is clearly a
> problem if you're trying to install the OS onto the USB stick or clone
> an existing OS.
>
> My second USB stick was fine for bulk writes, but had some other sort
> of problem. During myth playback, every 5-30 minutes or so, playback
> (and presumably the whole system as well) would pause for a couple
> seconds. I tried cloning it back to a hard drive and it ran
> flawlessly for a week, so I'm certain it was a problem with the USB
> stick.
>
> For my third stick, I decided to choose something with hundreds of
> high Newegg ratings. This led me to the "Patriot Xporter XT Boost"
> line, which was rock solid for as long as I used it. I recommend the
> 8GB size. 4GB was enough for me, until I started installing this
> package and that, until it pushed a little over 4GB.
>
> By the way, be sure to use the "noatime" option when mounting file
> systems on the USB stick. Otherwise every file that is opened, even
> for reading, will actually involve another write to the file system.
>
> Of course, in the spirit of ION systems and minimalism, your next step
> is obviously to set up your system for net-booting. :) How to do this
> may be obvious to many or well-documented elsewhere, but I documented
> my own experience on this list.
> http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/mythtv/users/391239


The problem with flash drives is they generally state the size and the price,
and that's about it. The many other factors are never even mentioned. If you
go to the manufacturer's site you can sometimes find more info, but not
always. I'm always afraid of specs that start with "up to", those two words,
as used by ISPs, sometimes actually mean "something above zero".

In addition to using the "noatime" mounting option, you also want to make sure
you are not swapping to partition on a flash device.

It's hard to say though, I have a system running Debian Sarge from a 1GB
flash stick that's been running for over two years with no problems (NSLU2
system), and I did not use noatime, and I am swapping to a partition on that
stick. IOW I did everything "wrong", and have had no problems.

Running entire systems from flash devices seems to be the ultimate "YMMV"
situation. Fortunately the devices are cheap enough to allow for considerable
experimentation.



--
Brian Wood
beww [at] beww
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richard.e.morton at gmail

Nov 23, 2009, 7:08 AM

Post #5 of 19 (856 views)
Permalink
Re: USB Flash Memory for boot/system. What is fast enough? [In reply to]
> In addition to using the "noatime" mounting option, you also want to make sure
> you are not swapping to partition on a flash device.

ok, thanks.

I am using a 4GB Bytestor drive with no problems knows (occasional
lockup of mythfrontend, not sure of the cause yet).

my fstab has a swap entry onto the USB drive:
# swap was on /dev/sda5 during installation
UUID=0782c3c7-23a6-4149-89fc-696673f55b83 none swap
sw,noatime 0 0

if this is not the done thing, what should it look like; what device/what fs?

thanks in advance

R
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stichnot at gmail

Nov 23, 2009, 7:15 AM

Post #6 of 19 (856 views)
Permalink
Re: USB Flash Memory for boot/system. What is fast enough? [In reply to]
On Mon, Nov 23, 2009 at 7:08 AM, Richard Morton
<richard.e.morton [at] gmail> wrote:
> my fstab has a swap entry onto the USB drive:
> # swap was on /dev/sda5 during installation
> UUID=0782c3c7-23a6-4149-89fc-696673f55b83 none            swap
> sw,noatime              0       0
>
> if this is not the done thing, what should it look like; what device/what fs?

Try commenting out that line entirely (disabling swap). You can
temporarily disable swapping by running "swapoff -a". I have never
had swapping enabled on my ION frontends. It even seems to work fine
with only 1GB RAM installed (though I normally run with 2GB).

Jim
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richard.e.morton at gmail

Nov 23, 2009, 7:22 AM

Post #7 of 19 (855 views)
Permalink
Re: USB Flash Memory for boot/system. What is fast enough? [In reply to]
ahh, I only have 512MB and some of that is shared with video... on a VIA SP13000

thanks for the swapoff -a tip before altering fstab; will try it now.

R
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aclose at gmail

Nov 23, 2009, 7:27 AM

Post #8 of 19 (850 views)
Permalink
Re: USB Flash Memory for boot/system. What is fast enough? [In reply to]
On Mon, Nov 23, 2009 at 8:22 AM, Jim Stichnoth <stichnot [at] gmail> wrote:
> On Sun, Nov 22, 2009 at 2:59 PM, Andrew Close <aclose [at] gmail> wrote:
>> i'm planning out a Zotac IONITX-B-E Atom N230 FE and am looking to
>> boot/run off of a USB stick.  what speed is fast enough to limit any
>> hiccups during playback/menu navigation?  i wouldn't think it would be
>> a huge deal since the USB stick will just contain the OS and FE while
>> all content would be coming over the wire, but i've seen mention of
>> slow USB sticks causing issues.
>> most of the sticks i've looked at list their speed at 200x, but what
>> does that mean?  i've only seen a few that have any r/w performance
>> listed. any thoughts/suggestions?
>
> My experience is that you need to worry about more than the "up to
> 200x" or whatever rating the manufacturer gives.
>
> My first USB stick had some sort of bulk write problem.  If I did too
> much sustained writing, I would get an I/O error and Linux would stop
> recognizing the drive until I reinserted it.  This is clearly a
> problem if you're trying to install the OS onto the USB stick or clone
> an existing OS.
>
> My second USB stick was fine for bulk writes, but had some other sort
> of problem.  During myth playback, every 5-30 minutes or so, playback
> (and presumably the whole system as well) would pause for a couple
> seconds.  I tried cloning it back to a hard drive and it ran
> flawlessly for a week, so I'm certain it was a problem with the USB
> stick.
>
> For my third stick, I decided to choose something with hundreds of
> high Newegg ratings.  This led me to the "Patriot Xporter XT Boost"
> line, which was rock solid for as long as I used it.  I recommend the
> 8GB size.  4GB was enough for me, until I started installing this
> package and that, until it pushed a little over 4GB.
>
> By the way, be sure to use the "noatime" option when mounting file
> systems on the USB stick.  Otherwise every file that is opened, even
> for reading, will actually involve another write to the file system.
>
> Of course, in the spirit of ION systems and minimalism, your next step
> is obviously to set up your system for net-booting. :)  How to do this
> may be obvious to many or well-documented elsewhere, but I documented
> my own experience on this list.
> http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/mythtv/users/391239

Jim,

thanks for the reply and the pointers. netbooting probably is the
next logical step, but i figured the USB stick would be easier for a
novice. i'll definitely check out the link you shared and look up
netbooting as well. maybe it'll save me an extra $30. :)


--
Andrew Close
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beww at beww

Nov 23, 2009, 7:29 AM

Post #9 of 19 (857 views)
Permalink
Re: USB Flash Memory for boot/system. What is fast enough? [In reply to]
On Monday 23 November 2009 08:08:32 Richard Morton wrote:
> > In addition to using the "noatime" mounting option, you also want to make
> > sure you are not swapping to partition on a flash device.
>
> ok, thanks.
>
> I am using a 4GB Bytestor drive with no problems knows (occasional
> lockup of mythfrontend, not sure of the cause yet).
>
> my fstab has a swap entry onto the USB drive:
> # swap was on /dev/sda5 during installation
> UUID=0782c3c7-23a6-4149-89fc-696673f55b83 none swap
> sw,noatime 0 0
>
> if this is not the done thing, what should it look like; what device/what
> fs?

The best solution is to not have a swap file or partition on a flash device at
all. Depending on how much RAM you have, and what you are doing, you may be
able to get along without any swap at all. That's what I am doing with my
flash-based Debian system.

I'm not sure what the noatime parameter would do with a swap partition, it's
intended to eliminate writing the access time each time a file is accessed on
a normal file system, but swap is not handled as a normal filesystem.

If it's not causing any problems it certainly couldn't hurt, but I would try
to get swap off a flash device, either by eliminating it entirely if you can,
or writing it to a standard HDD partition, or even use an NFS-mounted file.

Swap can be enabled on either a partition or a file, as you probably know.

Perhaps someone with a better understanding of how the kernel handles swap
will have better suggestions?

--
Brian Wood
beww [at] beww
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richard.e.morton at gmail

Nov 23, 2009, 7:30 AM

Post #10 of 19 (856 views)
Permalink
Re: USB Flash Memory for boot/system. What is fast enough? [In reply to]
I would be interested in the following numbers; what is the
comparative cold-boot duration of a decent usb stick, hard-disc and
net-boot over fast and gig-ethernet?

thanks
R
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travis at tabbal

Nov 23, 2009, 7:38 AM

Post #11 of 19 (851 views)
Permalink
Re: USB Flash Memory for boot/system. What is fast enough? [In reply to]
On Mon, Nov 23, 2009 at 8:27 AM, Andrew Close <aclose [at] gmail> wrote:

>
> thanks for the reply and the pointers. netbooting probably is the
> next logical step, but i figured the USB stick would be easier for a
> novice. i'll definitely check out the link you shared and look up
> netbooting as well. maybe it'll save me an extra $30. :)
>


That would be my sugestion as well. I have done it with an 8GB OCZ Rally2
USB stick, and it worked fine. I only had one problem with that method, the
USB stick would sometimes decide not to enumerate on boot, so I wouldn't
have a boot drive. I would have to pull the stick and re-insert to reset it
for it to work again. I asked OCZ about it, but all they had to say was "we
don't recommend booting from USB flash drives". Other than that one little
glitch that I'd only see once a month or so, it worked fine and the stick is
quite fast as those things go.

I switched to netbooting and haven't looked back. I don't run swap on either
of my frontends. RAM is cheap enough that I just put in a little extra and
it works fine without swap. One of my frontends only has 1GB and it's fine.
It doesn't have shared video memory though, that machine is using a video
card so I can use VDPAU. The one with an onboard video card has 2GB with
512M for video. All data is accessed over gigabit ethernet. The Mythbuntu
distro makes it really easy to set up netbooting. I'm sure there are ways to
do it on the others as well, that's just the distro I happened to be using
anyway.


travis at tabbal

Nov 23, 2009, 7:54 AM

Post #12 of 19 (860 views)
Permalink
Re: USB Flash Memory for boot/system. What is fast enough? [In reply to]
On Mon, Nov 23, 2009 at 8:30 AM, Richard Morton
<richard.e.morton [at] gmail>wrote:

> I would be interested in the following numbers; what is the
> comparative cold-boot duration of a decent usb stick, hard-disc and
> net-boot over fast and gig-ethernet?
>


I don't really have numbers as I've never timed it with anything more than
just watching it go. However, with a decent server to boot from, I find
netbooting faster than USB or local HDD. The server in my case is able to
saturate the gigabit link without much hassle, and small old HDDs we would
tend to use for these sorts of things just can't push data that fast. I was
using older EIDE disks. I decided it was more cost effective to put the fast
nice drives in a server and boot the systems from there so I wasn't wasting
a ton of space on the nice drives. Even the old 40GB drives I was using for
boot disks before were only using 5GB or so. It seemed wasteful to put
500GB+ drives in there.

Both of my frontends go from cold boot to MythFrontend in about 45sec I
would guess. I could cut that down some, but it's fast enough that it
doesn't bother me. I don't have much for services running on them, LIRC and
SSH are about it other than the basics that a Linux system always has. I
also use a lightweight window manager, the default one Mythbuntu uses, I
don't remember which one that is, but it's not Gnome or KDE.

I haven't ever done it with 100M ethernet, so I can't really comment on that
one. I would guess it would be slower than HDD, but not too bad overall.
I've seen gigabit switches for $20 or so, well worth the upgrade if your
cabling is at least CAT5, which I think you need for 100M anyway.


gregcope at gmail

Nov 23, 2009, 8:09 AM

Post #13 of 19 (853 views)
Permalink
Re: USB Flash Memory for boot/system. What is fast enough? [In reply to]
On 23 Nov 2009, at 15:29, Brian Wood <beww [at] beww> wrote:

> On Monday 23 November 2009 08:08:32 Richard Morton wrote:
>
> The best solution is to not have a swap file or partition on a flash
> device at
> all. Depending on how much RAM you have, and what you are doing, you
> may be
> able to get along without any swap at all. That's what I am doing
> with my
> flash-based Debian system.
>

I would argue that for an FE you should only tun things for playback
implying that they should not be swapped out.

However I see no technical reason why you could npt have swap on
flash, and with it's low seek tume flash is actually quite suited to
it. Windows ready boost is using it in this way (ie extending VM).


> I'm not sure what the noatime parameter would do with a swap
> partition, it's
> intended to eliminate writing the access time each time a file is
> accessed on
> a normal file system, but swap is not handled as a normal filesystem.
>

Noatime will do nothing for swap.


> If it's not causing any problems it certainly couldn't hurt, but I
> would try
> to get swap off a flash device, either by eliminating it entirely if
> you can,
> or writing it to a standard HDD partition, or even use an NFS-
> mounted file.
>
> Swap can be enabled on either a partition or a file, as you probably
> know.
>
> Perhaps someone with a better understanding of how the kernel
> handles swap
> will have better suggestions?
>
> --

You can trun down swappyness or run with none at all as long as you
have enough memory to run all the bits you need. Otherwise when the
kernel gets desperate it will run an OOM killer that usually zaps
something important. Memory is pretty cheap.

Netbooting is usually easy to configure and update. Once running in a
ram disk things are usually pretty fast. You then avoid any USB
storage issues and the CPU overhead of USB storage (Scsi emulation
etc...)

Having said that if you are not going to run nfs and or this is for a
backend flash can be ok as long as you get a reliable stick. If
anyone has any recomendations bar the patriot xts pls share!

Greg

>
> Brian Wood
> beww [at] beww
> _______________________________________________
> mythtv-users mailing list
> mythtv-users [at] mythtv
> http://mythtv.org/cgi-


beww at beww

Nov 23, 2009, 8:28 AM

Post #14 of 19 (833 views)
Permalink
Re: USB Flash Memory for boot/system. What is fast enough? [In reply to]
On Monday 23 November 2009 09:09:47 Greg Cope wrote:

> I would argue that for an FE you should only tun things for playback
> implying that they should not be swapped out.
>
> However I see no technical reason why you could npt have swap on
> flash, and with it's low seek tume flash is actually quite suited to
> it. Windows ready boost is using it in this way (ie extending VM).

The only problem I see is if you are making very heavy use of swap it might
wear out the flash device, but if you are swapping that much you need more
RAM anyway.

>
> > I'm not sure what the noatime parameter would do with a swap
> > partition, it's
> > intended to eliminate writing the access time each time a file is
> > accessed on
> > a normal file system, but swap is not handled as a normal filesystem.
>
> Noatime will do nothing for swap.

That's what I suspected, thanks for confirming it. I'm surprised the system
even accepts that parameter for a swap partition.
>
> > If it's not causing any problems it certainly couldn't hurt, but I
> > would try
> > to get swap off a flash device, either by eliminating it entirely if
> > you can,
> > or writing it to a standard HDD partition, or even use an NFS-
> > mounted file.
> >
> > Swap can be enabled on either a partition or a file, as you probably
> > know.
> >
> > Perhaps someone with a better understanding of how the kernel
> > handles swap
> > will have better suggestions?
> >
> > --
>
> You can trun down swappyness or run with none at all as long as you
> have enough memory to run all the bits you need. Otherwise when the
> kernel gets desperate it will run an OOM killer that usually zaps
> something important. Memory is pretty cheap.
>
> Netbooting is usually easy to configure and update. Once running in a
> ram disk things are usually pretty fast. You then avoid any USB
> storage issues and the CPU overhead of USB storage (Scsi emulation
> etc...)
>
> Having said that if you are not going to run nfs and or this is for a
> backend flash can be ok as long as you get a reliable stick. If
> anyone has any recomendations bar the patriot xts pls share!

That's why I get frustrated when they supply such minimal specs for the
devices. Some have better wear-leveling algotithms than others, but I guess
you can't expect a vendor to advertise "crappy wear leveling".

Sometimes different devices with identical capacity have vastly different
prices, but I never know if a higher price indicates a better device or a
greedier vendor.

--
Brian Wood
beww [at] beww
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richard.e.morton at gmail

Nov 23, 2009, 9:02 AM

Post #15 of 19 (838 views)
Permalink
Re: USB Flash Memory for boot/system. What is fast enough? [In reply to]
running Mythbuntu with myth0.21

is this a little tight ?

$ free
            total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:        444668     439968       4700          0        200     115016
-/+ buffers/cache:     324752     119916
Swap:            0          0          0

R
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drescherjm at gmail

Nov 23, 2009, 9:06 AM

Post #16 of 19 (838 views)
Permalink
Re: USB Flash Memory for boot/system. What is fast enough? [In reply to]
On Mon, Nov 23, 2009 at 12:02 PM, Richard Morton
<richard.e.morton [at] gmail> wrote:
> running Mythbuntu with myth0.21
>
> is this a little tight ?
>
> $ free
>             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
> Mem:        444668     439968       4700          0        200     115016
> -/+ buffers/cache:     324752     119916
> Swap:            0          0          0
>
> R
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119MiB free seems fine

--
John M. Drescher
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aclose at gmail

Nov 23, 2009, 9:29 AM

Post #17 of 19 (833 views)
Permalink
Re: USB Flash Memory for boot/system. What is fast enough? [In reply to]
well, i guess i'll skip the USB Flash for the moment and go straight
to netboot. i do have an 8GB USB Flash key available if i can't get
netboot working, but it sounds like netboot is the way to go and will
save me a little bit of money.
swap won't be an issue. RAM is cheap so i'm using more than enough.
i'm networked with CAT5e and can swap out the switch from 100MB to
1000MB if i find a decent deal on GB switches.

thanks for the pointers and discussion. i love this group. :)

--
Andrew Close
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pc-mythtv08a at crowcastle

Nov 23, 2009, 9:36 AM

Post #18 of 19 (831 views)
Permalink
Re: USB Flash Memory for boot/system. What is fast enough? [In reply to]
On Mon, 2009-11-23 at 11:29 -0600, Andrew Close wrote:
> well, i guess i'll skip the USB Flash for the moment and go straight
> to netboot. i do have an 8GB USB Flash key available if i can't get
> netboot working, but it sounds like netboot is the way to go and will
> save me a little bit of money.

There are some thumb drives that have eSATA in addition to USB. I'm
interested in going that route so that the interface won't be a
bottleneck. Unfortunately, I'm under the impression that most flash
drives are made with slow flash, and until the market matures,
comparison shopping and determining requirements is tough.

I'm interested in doing 32GB for my boot, binaries, and database
partition, but I'm not convinced that the current cheap flash is faster
than my drive, so I'll probably hold off until my current drive is too
small.

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stichnot at gmail

Nov 23, 2009, 10:06 AM

Post #19 of 19 (833 views)
Permalink
Re: USB Flash Memory for boot/system. What is fast enough? [In reply to]
On Mon, Nov 23, 2009 at 9:29 AM, Andrew Close <aclose [at] gmail> wrote:
> well, i guess i'll skip the USB Flash for the moment and go straight
> to netboot.  i do have an 8GB USB Flash key available if i can't get
> netboot working, but it sounds like netboot is the way to go and will
> save me a little bit of money.
> swap won't be an issue.  RAM is cheap so i'm using more than enough.
> i'm networked with CAT5e and can swap out the switch from 100MB to
> 1000MB if i find a decent deal on GB switches.

Some distributions, such as Ubuntu/MythBuntu, include tools to
automatically set up a netboot system. If you're using such a
distribution, never mind what I wrote below...

I'm using MythDora, and to the best of my knowledge, it includes no
such tool, so I had to stumble around and figure it out myself. If
things don't go right, booting just fails, and unless you've done this
before, it can be very hard to figure out why it failed. So my advice
is to set up your system on a flash drive and use it as a fallback
while working on setting up netboot. Once the flash drive is set up
properly, clone it onto the NFS server ("rsync -avHx --delete
--progress" is my tool of choice).

Jim
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