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Silent, Durable Media For Servers?

Posted by Cliff on from the solid-state-storage dept.

Aldurn asks: "Recently, I've come into a living situation where having my rather loud computer continuously running is distinctly suboptimal. In order to maintain my current email address and webserver, in addition to running a decent set of iptables rules for the house, I decided to buy a Mini-ITX-based server. Currently, /dev/hda is running on a CompactFlash card, but I realize that this probably isn't the best thing to do when running a mail server, due to limitations of the media with regards to the number of writes possible over the lifetime of the media. I'm looking to add another storage medium to the device for /var in order to maintain the logs, as well as for mail storage and other bits that like to live in that directory. The media doesn't have to be terribly large (preferably at least 64 MB), and can be connected through IDE, USB, the floppy connector, or through the network. The end goal of this exercise is simply to prevent my poor CF card from dying an early death from continuous writes. What do you suggest for such a situation?"

5 of 50 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Ramdisk by greck · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I'd be scared to store mail that way... but how about loading into a ramdisk at boot from CF, and running from ramdisk, with a periodic rsync or something to CF? That will give you a measure of permanence while still cutting back substantially on the writes.

  2. JFFS2 by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    Try using the JFFS2 filesystem. This is a Linux filesystem designed for flash media - it is aware of the media's limitations and try to get the maximum life possible. Flash cards are pretty cheap, and might be your best option if you want total silence.

    Another option would be to use a laptop hard drive (with a laptop IDE to standard IDE convertor), an IBM microdrive, or even a standard IDE drive with good acoustic specs (some are designed to be quiet).

  3. Put /var elsewhere by YouHaveSnail · · Score: 2, Interesting

    If you've got plenty of bandwidth and/or speed isn't a major requirement, get some space on a WebDAV server and put your /var directory there. You get the convenience of keeping your machine at home, and the reliability of having your mail and web stuff written to disk. As long as your connection stays up, you're fine. And without a connection, web and mail servers aren't all that useful anyway.

  4. usb key? by perlchild · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Wouldn't a usb key do what you want(they're about the size of compact flash, if not larger, and don't have the limited write problem, to my knowledge)

  5. Microdrive? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    I just set up a soekris system (http://www.soekris.com/) with an IBM microdrive. That sucker is whisper-quite, just the occasional clicky-clicky from the drive.

    I have no idea about the lifespan of the microdrive when used in a server but I guess I'm gonna find out!! I do have /var mounted on a 10MB ramdisk (this is with FreeBSD by the way) and it is flushed to/loaded from the drive at shutdown/boot .. so the drive activity is minimized.