On Jul 11, 2011 4:07 PM, "William Hopkins" <we.hopkins@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 07/11/11 at 03:47pm, shawn wilson wrote:
> > On Jul 11, 2011 3:30 PM, "William Hopkins" <we.hopkins@gmail.com> wrote:
> > >
> >
> > > Don't get me started on not being able to find small HDDs anymore :P
> > >
> >
> > I've got some 40 meg hdd's on my shelf (think they're SCSI). I'll send you
> > one if you pay up front. I think they're about 8 lbs :)
>
> Heh, I don't have any that small anymore.
>
> > But seriously, I've never had an issue with this. You can get a cf card or
> > (possibly SD card) controller you can boot from or possibly a new usb card
> > for that.
>
> SD cards are preettyy slow for booting. And not good for heavy writes.
>
Yeah. How often do you *boot*? I thought they fit the bill quite nicely when you want to load a small system into RAM, do something like open iscsi, or whatever. I had only setup pxe once for doing mass backups and image deployments and it worked decent. I don't have a good feel for a use case of one over the other.
> > However I've only done this once. In the industry, we use fc or iscsi hba
> > cards that allow booting off of a san. And pxe works in a pinch (or for
> > clients if you were smart about what and how you purchase).
>
> Which industry? I've done IT in the financial, retail, and tech industries and
> booting from SAN or PXE are not standard. My complaint was for home use,
> though.. these 500GB+ disks are just absurdly overkill for my uses.
>
I've mainly worked in environments that use vm servers and 2x $400 HBAs are just standard build (in HP dl360 - haven't been able to convince anyone to try the BLade stuff).
However, as I said above, pxe has been integrated into most BIOS / nic for 8+ years. So it should work for most use cases.