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From: Robert Shady <rls@mail.id.net>
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Subject: Re: T1 upgrade options?
In-Reply-To: <33C40887.41C67EA6@tri-lakes.net> from Chris Dillon at "Jul 9, 97 09:54:15 pm"
To: cdillon@tri-lakes.net (Chris Dillon)
Date: Thu, 10 Jul 1997 07:37:27 -0400 (EDT)
Cc: nate@mt.sri.com, gary@tbe.net, fbsdlist@federation.addy.com,
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> If the boxes ONLY job were to be a router, would it be possible put
> everything it needed onto a floppy and build a system without a HD?  Or
> at least set up powersaving on the HD and let it spin down after a few
> minutes?  I imagine nothing needs to be written or read from the drive
> very often.

I don't know about the power saving mode, I've never had any luck getting
that to work properly, however it is possible to put everything on floppy.

On the same token, I think a hard drive is much more reliable than a floppy,
plus you don't have to wait 3-4 minutes for your router to come back to
life after a reboot.  At least with a hard drive, all of the moving parts
and magnetic material is sealed up, where-as in a floppy *everything* is
exposed to the environment.  We've had hard drives running 24/7 since we
went online in January '94 without any problems, and hard drives have come
along way in quality since then..

To make things better, I would say your best bet if you want to be sure,
would be to get one of those hard-cards, where you store everything in
NVRAM and it looks like a very fast hard drive to your computer system.

	-- Rob
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