Run MineOS from USB Stick

I'm using a mac and I'm making a virtual machine (MineOS) with VirtualBox. If I were to run the virtual machine (and it's resources, including the virtual hard disk) from the usb drive, would it wear out very quickly from read/writes?

I'm not sure how much read/writing it will receive but I wouldn't want to run it off the USB for a day and find out the next morning that it's totally dead.

Solution 1:

While it's true that heavy use reduces the lifespan of a flash drive, most people rather underestimate how long they last. If you're considering using a flash drive for I/O-intensive tasks, I highly recommend Jeroen Kessel's description of the problem. He's specifically addressing defragmentation, but the second paragraph in particular applies to any kind of disk-heavy operation.

In particular, he says:

In order to wear out a cheap 10,000 cycle flash memory disk in ten years, you would have to write to EVERY BLOCK in the device about 2.7 times per day, every single day.

Minecraft's I/O usage went down dramatically in 1.3 (due to the switch to region files), but is still fairly high due to its frequent saving of chunks. Assuming a disk-wide average of 27 writes per block per day due to very heavy Minecraft play (due to wear leveling, that's about 108 gigabytes of written data for a 4GB drive), even an el-cheapo drive would last at least a year!

Solution 2:

My personal recommendation: Do not do this!

I know from experience that a Minecraft server is reading and writing continously (albeit lessened if you turn off autosave). If you accidentally pulled the USB stick out while it was running, you could corrupt your world too.

I anticipate that if you try this, you will wear out the stick very fast (depending on the size and quality of the stick).