Re: reduce write access to hard disk [solved - sort of]
Dear all,
thanks for your suggestions on how to prolong the live of my flashdisk by
reducing write access to it.
It seems, the laptop mode, as proposed by some of you, does not work as
expected, at least I get some error messages when starting up the laptop
mode. I assume, the flash disk does not understand certain commands and
therefore refuses to cooperate.
As I'm not certain whether or not that works (and as with the dead silence
around me, I cannot say anything about whether it is spun down or not), I
fell back to another solution.
first of all, as reasonable flash disks try to reduce write access to
individual cells by spreading the writes through the entire free disk, it
helps, if you have lots of space left on the device to distribute the writes
among it. The more place is used up by never moved data, the sooner it will
die.
I therefore bought a 1GB memory stick for my home and tried to reduce the
static data von /. Second, I figured, most of the data on / will not change
unreasonable often. For example the /bin directory is only changed during
updates, which don't happen too often. So that leaves the home and /var/log
as frequent-write directories.
I therefore created a ramdisk, large enough to contain all data in /var/log
and have now changed the syslog script in a way, it stores all /var/log data
in a ramdisk mounted at /var/log and rsyncs it back on shutdown.
That leaves me with my home, where I have yet to find a cunning solution
(ramdisk is a: to large and b: to insecure).
If also found out, there will be a cheap SSD by the end of the year, called
I-Ram from Gigabyte, which allows you to use up to four DDR memory modules.
There is a similar product from hyperossystems, which is more expensive and
which is also not yet available (as it seems). Maybe, they will finally solve
my problems, once they are out.
Kind regards,
Jonathan
--
Somehow, the world always affects you more than you affect it.
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