[Gllug] CF card write limit

[Rich Walker]

John Hearns <john.hearns at clustervision.com> writes:

> On Sat, 2004-10-16 at 11:39, julian wrote:
>> Speaking of memory cards, has anyone heard of a card (CF, MMC, SD,
>> whatever) that overcomes the data writing limit of CF cards? (about
>> 10000 cycles IIRC). I am thinking of replacing hard disks with memory
>> cards in our mini-itx proxy boxes. 
> No device.
> But there is jffs2 http://sources.redhat.com/jffs2/
> Probably less relevant if you are putting /var on a RAM disk, as below.

Alternatively, mount as many things as tmpfs as possible, and use NBD to
swap to a remote box with spinning disks.

I have a machine upstairs that mounts /var/lib/amavis/tmp on tmpfs, for
example.

You could also look at what the USB-memory-stick distro's like Damn
Small Linux do - they seem to have solved some of these problems.

>> Or, has anyone had a go at using a ram disk for /var partition and
>> writing that to CF card on power down, then loading it back to ram disk
>> on power up?
> That makes good sense.
> Or you could syslog to a box with a spinning hard disk.

Good idea in any case.

> One other bit of advice I read recently was to run a laptop kernel,
> which cuts down as much as possible on the writes to disk.

There are Debian packages for this sort of thing :->

> I read this in a step-by-step guide to using a CF distro, which also
> discussed using a RAM disk. Sorry - can't remember the URL.
> I've booted the mini-ITX from a CF card, more as a demo really.

I found CF to be really slow in adapters - the adapter didn't do
DMA... Not so bad via USB 2.0... You might find booting from CD and
copying the CD into RAM to be a faster boot.

cheers, Rich.


>
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