Date: Thu, 21 Sep 2000 17:44:32 -0600 From: Warner Losh <imp@village.org> To: Douglas Swarin <doug@staff.texas.net> Cc: freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG, kkemp@nwcr.net Subject: Re: Frustration with SCSI system Message-ID: <200009212344.RAA63251@harmony.village.org> In-Reply-To: Your message of "Thu, 21 Sep 2000 18:24:05 CDT." <20000921182405.A82919@staff.texas.net> References: <20000921182405.A82919@staff.texas.net> <20000920125128.F9141@fw.wintelcom.net> <NOEDICFPJKLKIDADMFFNKEIFDAAA.kkemp@nwcr.net>
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In message <20000921182405.A82919@staff.texas.net> Douglas Swarin writes: : Ideally, I would use one of the IDE flash-based drives on the market. One : brand is SanDisk, and they take a standard IDE connector and fit into a : 3.5" drive bay. You can get them very reasonably priced up to 128MB or : so, which is just fine for a boot partition. Since flash drives have no : moving parts, mechanical failure is not an issue, and since the root : partition is not written to much, the flash will not wear out for a : long time (flash cells wear out after about 100,000 writes; the flash : drives do load balancing and stuff to ensure that the (many) cells in : the drive are written to evenly). We use these devices heavily at Timing Solutions. Or rather we use a IDE <-> CF adapter and haven't had any devices wear out. And some of these devices have had rather heavy use. I think that it is closer to 1 million writes per cell, but I don't have my spec sheets handy. Are you sure that they do write balancing? The indications I have from the base chip technology is that they don't. I could have missed that in the data sheets. It has been a little while since I looked at them, so I might be misremembering. I can't seem to find the data sheets I looked at before. In any event, this works well. I usually have / be read only. This can be practacle if you don't have any users that desire to change their passwords... Since I have serveral machines that have an extremely limited number of users on, this works well. One can also mount / rw if you need to do maintenance on it for whatever reason. Warner To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
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