On Sat, 2004-03-06 at 18:30, Marc Singer wrote: > On Sun, Mar 07, 2004 at 03:06:37AM +0100, Steinar H. Gunderson wrote: > > Just a side note: They'll probably die a lot quicker than your hard drive, > > given that you're not mounting them read-only. Those things have a more or > > less fixed number of writes before they start to break. > > Doesn't it matter how the system is used? > > Most of the flash parts are rated for 100K erase cycles per 128KiB > block (StrataFlash). Cheap hard drives are usualy waranteed for only > one year. Assuming the best case for flash, and worst case for a hard > drive, the flash device can take about 250 block erase cycles/day in a > year of continuous use. The wear-leveling flash filesystems will > substantially extend the lifespan of the flash device. If the system > is setup to reduce unnecessary writes to the flash device, it seems > possible to get many years of use before the flash device fails. > > In other words, it seems reasonable to use flash as a hard-drive > replacement as long as one is clever. I have set up something like this on a small PowerPC box, with a 64MB flash card. I have put lots of stuff into ram disk (/tmp, /var/{log,lock,run}, /var/{lib,cache}/apt), using bind mounts. It is running for about half a year now, usually always on (so few reboots). I am still a little bit worried about /etc/mtab and /etc/network/ifstate (the latter can be put on ram disk as well). Of course, on reboot I loose all my log files. And I need to call apt-get update again, but that's not a problem. I have built a small Debian package for the ram disk setup, tell me if you are interested. Greetings, Oliver
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