It was a cheap CF card attached through an ide->cf adaptor, so I doubt it was doing any defect management, or if it was, it ran out of sectors to swap in.
It didn't show up as the drive shrinking, (that would have been neat), it was losing data - e2fsck errors, occasionally corrupted log files etc. Eventually I tried testing it by doing things like "dd"ing an image off of it, formatting that image via loop back and "dd"ing it back, and finding errors on the newly written drive.
At that point, I gave up on that cf disk, and switched to "boot off cf, but run on ram disk" plan.
I wanted to try out one of sandisk's ide cf drives, but adding ram and buying a new cf module was easier.
I'll second the vote for the seagate FDB drives, they're very quiet.
For laptop drives, in my experience, IBM laptop drives are pretty loud (as laptop drives go), but Fujitsu's laptop FDB drives (specifically the MHS series - i.e. MHS2030AT) are very quiet.
I had a similar issue with noise, and tried the same solution (fanless mini-itx with CF for storage).
My cf card died within a couple of months, apparently from writes to the log files in/var.
The replacement setup I did boots from CF, loads the operating system into tmpfs (ram disk if you're not familiar with it), and switches to running on completely from ram.
In other posts people have suggested frequently backing up you email onto the CF card - if you decide to do that (and it seems like a really good idea), you should be able to get a lot more life out of your card if you dd the image off the cf card into ram, mount the image via loopback, update the files on it, and then dd it back to the disk. It's not the total number of writes to the cf device which kills it, it's the number of writes to a given block which does it in, and updating several files in a directory ends up beating on the same few sectors many times with updates to the directory's metadata.
This takes "lots" of memory, but it's pretty cheap to slap 512MB into a mini-itx box, mail is pretty small, and if that's the only thing the system is doing, you can easily fit the whole image in less than 64MB.
I'd like it to be easy to get a list of the banner adds on a site. Occasionally I notice an add, click on something else (the story of the day or something), then remember that I wanted to see that add only it's too late. A nice - easy to get to index of adds served on the page would be helpful here.
Will that work point-to-multipoint (which is what I meant by a proper LAN)? So if I've got three or
four wireless devices, I can serve them all simultaneously off a single 802.11b card in peer-to-peer mode with no need for an access point?
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It was a cheap CF card attached through an ide->cf adaptor, so I doubt it was doing any defect management, or if it was, it ran out of sectors to swap in.
It didn't show up as the drive shrinking, (that would have been neat), it was losing data - e2fsck errors, occasionally corrupted log files etc. Eventually I tried testing it by doing things like "dd"ing an image off of it, formatting that image via loop back and "dd"ing it back, and finding errors on the newly written drive.
At that point, I gave up on that cf disk, and switched to "boot off cf, but run on ram disk" plan.
I wanted to try out one of sandisk's ide cf drives, but adding ram and buying a new cf module was easier.
-eviljav
No, I didn't mount it "noatime", though that would have been smart.
Sticking the whole operating system into tmpfs has worked out fine though, the system image fits in less than 24MB, so the box has over 400MB free...
-eviljav
I'll second the vote for the seagate FDB drives, they're very quiet.
For laptop drives, in my experience, IBM laptop drives are pretty loud (as laptop drives go), but Fujitsu's laptop FDB drives (specifically the MHS series - i.e. MHS2030AT) are very quiet.
-eviljav
I had a similar issue with noise, and tried the same solution (fanless mini-itx with CF for storage).
/var.
My cf card died within a couple of months, apparently from writes to the log files in
The replacement setup I did boots from CF, loads the operating system into tmpfs (ram disk if you're not familiar with it), and switches to
running on completely from ram.
In other posts people have suggested frequently backing up you email onto the CF card - if you decide to do that (and it seems like a really good idea), you should be able to get a lot more life out of your card if you dd the image off the cf card into ram, mount the image via loopback, update the files on it, and then dd it back to the disk. It's not the total number of writes to the cf device which kills it, it's the number of writes to a given block which does it in, and updating several files in a directory ends up beating on the same few sectors many times with updates to the directory's metadata.
This takes "lots" of memory, but it's pretty cheap to slap 512MB into a mini-itx box, mail is pretty small, and if that's the only thing the system is doing, you can easily fit the whole image in less than 64MB.
-eviljav
This seems neat: CD Home (it's a (10 disk?) CD holder that fits in a 5.25" bay).
Are you trying to suggest that this laser program is only a half-ass attempt?
The same imac that has a hard drive loud enough to drown out a dell sitting next to it with 3 fans?
At this point, there aren't any.
For a small display, maybe you could try something like this: http://www.thinkgeek.com/stuff/things/3288.html
I'd like it to be easy to get a list of the banner adds on a site. Occasionally I notice an add, click on something else (the story of the day or something), then remember that I wanted to see that add only it's too late. A nice - easy to get to index of adds served on the page would be helpful here.
rbowen said:
>In exchange for your left foot (payment up front)
>I will write you Quicktime and ASF for Linux.
At least that won't cost "an arm and a leg".