Date: Wed, 7 Feb 2001 11:50:53 -0500 (EST) From: Bob K <melange@yip.org> To: freebsd-small@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: your mail Message-ID: <Pine.BSF.4.21.0102071128290.96645-100000@yip.org> In-Reply-To: <005201c09124$120c2590$2aa85c0a@vulcan>
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On Wed, 7 Feb 2001, Jeffrey S. Sharp wrote: > > In my very very humble opinion, the PicoBSD approach was somewhat > > indirectional. Few intelligent people would want to run > > an embedded system with a floppy as storage media. > > And for repair disks, it would be much more advantageous to move to > bootable CD-ROM disks instead of floppies. I'd just like to jump in briefly with my 2c in defense of floppies. 1) Floppy drives can be found on pretty much every PC; CDROM drives aren't. Also, older BIOSes won't boot off of a CDROM drive. And I've got floppy drives that are 20 years old that still work reliably; I do not have any CDROM drives that work reliably after 4 years. 2) Although the reliability of floppies isn't that great, they are easily backed up and restored (dd if=/dev/fd0 of=backup.flp / dd if=backup.flp of=/dev/fd0). If you combine good-quality media with a design that only uses the floppy on bootup, it can be quite reliable. Example: Telebit Netblazer 40-series routers boot off a floppy. (I'll grant that the OS [fred] was, in certain cases, too buggy to allow for reliable operation, but that was due to the OS, not the fact that it used a floppy to boot) Floppy failures? I remember 1 failure out of hundreds of systems in the course of three years. Bootable flash media, of course, is preferred over all else, but I'd say floppies still have their place. And now I shall return to lurking. -- Bob <melange@yip.org> | iNFp To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-small" in the body of the message
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