In message <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 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
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