>> ... What if I bought a low-price/low-capacity SSD drive for each >> of these systems, installed the system essentials on them, and used my >> existing high-capacity HD drives for data storage? Would each system >> keep running if the HDs died? If so, I think that would offer as good >> or better system reliability than RAID1. What do you think? > > You don't need to buy SSD "drives" - instead you could use CF cards and a > cheap adaptor. These are commensurate in capacity & cost with USB flash > drives (4gig, maybe 16gig?), but CF cards "talk EIDE" and you can get cheap > pin-convertors allowing you to connect them to EIDE cables and treat them > like a hard-drive.
Aren't CF cards much slower than SSD drives and HD drives? > I know of these used in Asterisk based PABX systems & PoS tills with the > expectation that they're more reliable than disks, and have read statements > by people deploying quantities of such machines that they've never had a > failure in years of use. I like the sound of that. > I don't know how that really compares to RAID 1 - if you use hardware RAID > (and you can get hardware SATA controllers for £50 these days) then you can > assign a hot-spare, and hot-swap a replacement drive with zero downtime. > With hardware RAID you can still boot if one of the drives fails, but you do > add the controller as a potential point-of-failure. Would the system keeping running if I used a CF or SSD for the system install and the HD drive died? - Grant
