Removable storage devices and sync

["Nils O. Selåsdal"]

Nils Philippsen wrote:
> On Thu, 2004-10-28 at 11:30 +0200, Ralf Ertzinger wrote:
> 
>>Hi.
>>
>>I noticed that external storage deviced that are automagically added to
>>/etc/fstab by hal do not get the sync flag anymore (at least I think they
>>used to get it). Is this intentional?
>>
>>I know that sync does not solve all problems with suddenly disappearing
>>devices, but it sure helps :)
> 
> 
> IIRC it depends on the size of the storage, i.e. if it is below a
> certain size it won't get moutned sync because then it's probably some
> kind of a flash device which can only be written a certain number of
> times. In that case, sync is a bad idea because it will wear your device
> much faster.
What about noatime for such devices ? Shouldn't that help the wear of such
devices ? Especially since many flash devices have FAT fileystems on them,and
atime seems to be mapped to the other time fields on fat.