On 7/15/05, David M. N. Bryan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Not acording to SAN Disk's documentation. > > http://www.sandisk.com/pdf/oem/cf-manual-10.8.pdf > > They have 1,000,000 Hours MTBF. That's ~114 years. (Page 8)
The lifespan complaint was about IDE hard drives with spinning platters. > Minimum of 10,000 insertions, so that's not very much on a system that > writes more then a coupple of times a day. IIRC, "insertions" refers to mechanical insertions-- physically inserting the CF media into a camera or card reader. > Mounting the file system read only is ok, it's just when the CF gate > states are changed that they loose the ability to retain the state, bad > gates can be mapped around, but you now stand to loose data and corrupt > your CF. In the SanDisk URL referenced above, section 1.6.2 is the relevant block . . . > I'm still torn between HD vs CF. The one area where I'd really miss having a HD is local logging. > With HD you can get logs, and run > snort/squid with little or no effort. With a CF it's going to take a > little bit more work to get squid to run out of memory only (or MFS) Actually, it's really easy to get Squid to run out of memory only -- you just set the logs and the cache_dir to "null" and the only file Squid needs to write is the pidfile under /var/run. > and snort will need to log via syslog or something, which when dealing with > small clients, they may not have a syslog server setup, heck the OpenBSD > box maybe the most advanced OS they have on-site. For low-volume logs, some sort of battery-backed RAM storage would be perfect; someplace to save just a few megabytes of "state" and log data that can survive a reboot, but which doesn't have the write volume failure issues of flash memory. The SanDisk paper referenced above makes some interesting claims about the write resiliency of compactflash. Could be worth a trial, set up a second CF card just for logs, write to it for a year, see if it burns out :) Kevin Kadow
