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>>>> ... What if I bought a low-price/low-capacity SSD drive for each |
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>>>> of these systems, installed the system essentials on them, and used my |
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>>>> existing high-capacity HD drives for data storage? Would each system |
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>>>> keep running if the HDs died? If so, I think that would offer as good |
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>>>> or better system reliability than RAID1. What do you think? |
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>>> You don't need to buy SSD "drives" - instead you could use CF cards and a |
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>>> cheap adaptor. These are commensurate in capacity & cost with USB flash |
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>>> drives (4gig, maybe 16gig?), but CF cards "talk EIDE" and you can get cheap |
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>>> pin-convertors allowing you to connect them to EIDE cables and treat them |
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>>> like a hard-drive. |
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>> |
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>> Aren't CF cards much slower than SSD drives and HD drives? |
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>> |
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> |
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> Yep, especially the cheap ones which do not support DMA, just PIO. But |
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> this is not necessarily a problem: After starting all services etc. |
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> there will be very few reads on stuff like /etc and /usr. Just make sure |
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> to put all directories to which you write (parts of /var like /var/log |
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> and the several tmp directories) on an HDD, NFS or tmpfs. Of course, |
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> this all depends on your usage patterns and how much RAM you have. |
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> |
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> If you really need to write to the CFDisk, make sure to buy one with DMA |
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> support (and no, the label "super fast" which is regularly found on |
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> these things does not necessarily mean that it supports DMA). |
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> |
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> One drawback of this configuration: You can never use swap - never! |
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> Neither on the HDD (there is a high chance that the system would crash |
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> when the HDD fails) nor on the (cheap) SSD/flash drive (the drive would |
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> wear down, removing any advantage you tried to gain). |
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> |
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>>> I know of these used in Asterisk based PABX systems & PoS tills with the |
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>>> expectation that they're more reliable than disks, and have read statements |
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>>> by people deploying quantities of such machines that they've never had a |
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>>> failure in years of use. |
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>> |
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>> I like the sound of that. |
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> |
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> Where I work, we have a System-on-a-Chip (SoC) NAS. Albeit being the |
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> second most powerful machine we have in our server room (quad core CPU, |
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> lots of RAM, three redundant power supplies and a good dozen HDDs), the |
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> OSS itself resides on a removable card not bigger than my thumb. |
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|
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Is cost-savings the advantage of using CF instead of SSD? It sounds |
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like it might be wiser to spend a little more (low capacity SSD drives |
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are pretty cheap now) and have a real storage device that doesn't need |
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an adapter and is much faster, can swap, etc. |
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|
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I bet I'm missing something though...? |
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|
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- Grant |
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|
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|
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>>> I don't know how that really compares to RAID 1 - if you use hardware RAID |
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>>> (and you can get hardware SATA controllers for £50 these days) then you can |
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>>> assign a hot-spare, and hot-swap a replacement drive with zero downtime. |
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>>> With hardware RAID you can still boot if one of the drives fails, but you do |
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>>> add the controller as a potential point-of-failure. |
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>> |
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>> Would the system keeping running if I used a CF or SSD for the system |
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>> install and the HD drive died? |
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>> |
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>> - Grant |