On 2016-01-18 10:22, Michael Havens wrote:

so no go on the sd cards then. what about thumb drives?

Putting non-FAT filesystems on USB disks works just fine.  Most modern BIOSes will happily read and boot from an ISO9660 or UDF filesystem that's been dd'ed to a USB disk.  An ext3 filesystem on a USB disk is totally feasible; my removable backup drives are ext3.  The only real problem with using ext3 on a removable disk is that it's a pain to read that disk from an OS X machine.  (Windows has ext2ifs, which allows Windows to treat an ext3 partition as just another drive.)

I don't think that using ext3 on a flash-memory device would improve the device's lifetime though.  Flash-memory devices almost always have wear-leveling built in at a level lower than the block device layer.  Logical sector 1 may be mapped to physical sector 4567, and that mapping may change at any time.  They had to do this, because the FAT is always in the same set of logical sectors, and is written to frequently.

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