RouterOS on USB stick

RouterOS General
1

Mikrotik RouterOS 3.0 RC… changelog says, among others:

New features commentary:

*) installation and boot of USB sticks/drives with RouterOS
Netinstall can now install RouterOS on USB drives. Minitowers
and rackmounts with bios’s that support USB boot can now easily boot
from USB flash/hard drives. The USB flash sticks are available in
most electronics stores and are a suitable replacement from IDE
flashdrives and CF with IDE adaptors. It might be advisable to find
a secure place to connect the USB stick so that it can’t be knocked
off easily. As of v3rc2,there is one problem that you should not
have a hard drive with RouterOS in the same system or the boot
program on the USB drive will find the hard drive with RouterOS and
probably boot that instead of the RouterOS on the USB stick – we
will work on fixing this.

Want to know if RouterOS does anything to spread the disk writes on all the surface of the disk, or if it controls this in any way, to prevent early failure of the flash ?
Yes, I know, use quality flash’es, but even these have a limited lifetime.
( So, between a hard-disk and a flash what would you recommend ? Or, better said, what would you use: HDD, usb-flash or compact-flash + ide adapter ? )

2

excellent news. i am curious how the license works though - since the usb stick most likely will change it’s serial number more often than a CF thats accessed via IDE.

3

I wonder why would you say that. Why should a usb stick change it’s serial … if you don’t format it by other means…
But the question remains.
Are the writes spread on all the surface ?
Why am I asking: On compact flash, i have a reserve in keeping the logs on disk. Would this be feasible on usb ? Meaning, more reliable ?

4

quality flash media have a feature that does this, RouterOS also tries to do it. Today, flash media is as reliable as any other, if we are talking about good quality products.

5

Thank you very much.