Offload Volumio to USB?

I’ve worn out two (2) SD cards while using Volumio. Doing some research, I’ve found that certain brands of SD cards handle the I/O of an operating system better than others. I’ve been reading that you can modify the partition and boot schemes of the typical RPi distros to have the /boot partition on SD and the rest of the OS on a USB stick. Since Volumio already incorporates a USB drive (in my configuration, anyway), I wondered how difficult it would be to implement this scheme? I’m not enough of a hacker to pull off moving the distro to the USB alongside my music but I wondered if a development effort could be made to at least investigate the possibility of mainstreaming a USB implementation of Volumio?

I’d be interested to hear the community’s thoughts.

I’m using a Raspberry Pi and have moved the root-filesystem off to a USB-stick. see: c-mobberley.com/wordpress/index. … o-usb-hdd/
One thing to be aware of: be sure the size of the USB-stick is equal or bigger then the root-filesystem of your SD-card. I used a 8GB card (root-filesystem was expanded to use the whole SD-card) and wanted to move to a 8GB USB-stick but the size of the stick was a little less !! It took some work to get it moved. Best thing is to install Volumio from scratch which occupies approx 2GB and then move the root-filesystem. Expand the root-filesystem which you copied to the USB-stick and boot as described with the USB-stick root-filesystem.

BTW, same procedure works with a USB-HDD. I use a NAS, so I did not need the extra space of a HDD in this setup.

The problem is that Volumio uses ext3 (if I rememer correctly) that has no Flash wear leveling support.
If JFFS were used, every problem would disappear: JFFS is meant for flash devices.