Mayuresh Kathe wrote: > I would recommend the Microdrive option. > It uses the CF-II interface which is provided by all new Soekris systems. > > *AVOID* 2.5" IDE Laptop drives. > I've had pretty bad experience with them, > 1. They heat up a lot > 2. Are slow > 3. Fail quite often (this could be due to the heat) > (face problems with Toshiba and IBM) > > Since you mention that you are going to do logging, go for the 4Gb > model or higher.
HUH? You say avoid 2.5" laptop drives due to heat, speed and failure, and instead recommend Microdrive? Which are SLOWER, probably less reliable, and probably even higher heat density? I think you are allowing past bad experience to lead you in even worse directions (hey, I've done that. Got some stories about when I was frustrated at all the major HD makers, and so I bought these..uh..JTS hard disks, figuring, "hey, they can't be worse!" How Wrong I Was.) For reference, I reached down here and pulled out a 6G laptop drive, that I just so happened to have pulled out of a laptop earlier this week. IBM 6G Travelstar, seems to be about 1999 vintage stuff. After a bit of hunting, I found some specs -- media transfer rate: 161.6Mbps, which is about 50% faster than the (brand new) Microdrive. Seek times are comparable (avg. 12ms ea.). Power consumption: the Microdrive is 3.3v, .305A. The Travelstar is 5v, ~0.5A. So yes, the Microdrive uses less power, but based on the size, yes, looks like a comparable or higher heat density (-> temp). That six year old drive is, well, six years old. Yes, I'm sure they aren't the most reliable devices around, but it was working when I pulled it out of the machine and I'm betting on them being more reliable than the relatively cutting-edge Microdrives. Those ultra-small drives aren't designed for reliability... I managed to toast two laptop hard disks in a couple weeks. Then I found the very powerful magnet I had absent-mindedly stuck in the laptop case...other than that, I've had "decent" luck with the things (i.e., no other failures, but I'm a light laptop user...and usually up the disk size before it gets too many hours on it). > On 7/15/05, Rod.. Whitworth <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >> I am about to implement some firewalls using Soekris 4801 systems. >> >> There are many good documents about using various ways to do this using >> CF and assorted RAM-drive etc methods. >> >> What I am looking for are comments from people who have tried some of >> these techniques and have experience on some facets of competeting ways >> to do the job. >> >> I see that we can use: >> CF >> Microdrive (in a CF slot) >> 2.5" IDE laptop drive. Personally, I see the Soekris boxes as the ultimate in small, silent and low power. If I were to want to use anything OTHER than CF, I'd probably use a bigger box for other benefits. >> Way back I would have dropped CF where I need logging and some other >> persistent data storage (spamdb etc) due to the limited cycle life. Now >> I hear this in not an issue. Does this fact make this choice a prime >> candidate? All devices can fail. (heh. sounds too much like that phrase, "All software has bugs"...which is usually used as an excuse to quit trying to do better) People expecting their flash storage to last forever because it has no moving parts are going to be dissapointed, I suspect. On the other hand, it doesn't sound like they just work for six months and die. Due to their relative low price, you could probably set up a service contract, and ship out new (updated) drives yearly, and never have to worry about the finite write cycles. *IF* you could find an adapter that works (hint: it isn't trivial), the SD flash cards are interesting (to me) because they have a write-protect switch. For the moment, we'll just not talk about how much money I spent on adapters, over and over, just to find out NONE of the ones I bought delt with the 3.3v to 5v conversion properly. (not that this is useful if you want durable logs) Some time back, I set up a CF wireless AP bridge. Just did a very normal OpenBSD install, the ONLY Flash-specific mods were to use the "noatime" option and make no swap partition. It ran for well over a year without issue before network changes prompted me to power it down. Flash media still has a finite number of writes for any particular bit, but apparently the modern ones do read-after-write verifies and automatic failed-cell replacement from a sizable pool of spares. So that "finite" life could be very long. >> >> Using spinning storage begs the question as to whether either flavour >> will automatically spin down when idle for some time? Alternatively can >> I do this another way? If you want any kind of logging/database, you probably don't ever want the drive to spin down. Well, probably. Maybe boot from flash, run and live off flash, log to MFS, and as part of the nightly /etc/daily.local process, spin up a real disk, back up the MFS disks to hard storage. Or heck, even to the flash -- one burst of writing is better than a write every event. Nick.
