Baslinux mailing list

["Anthony Albert" <albert AT polaris.umpi.maine.edu>]

On 25 Jan 2005 at 9:32, James Miller wrote:
>On Tue, 25 Jan 2005, sindi keesan wrote:
>
>> CF cards come in 32MB and up (at least 256MB).  Might be a faster way to
>> run linux and use less power on a laptop.  Has anyone tried this?
>
>My router/firewall/ftp server uses a CF card for a hard drive. It runs
>Freesco, which uses umsdos and boots easily from a 64MB card (runs mostly
>in RAM thereafter). These cards are said to have a limited life--X number
>of reads/writes and they're finished. I think they're supposed to have
>shorter life expectancies than HD's, but don't know of any reliable
>figures. They are definitely faster than HD's.  Older BIOSes seem to have
>trouble with the wierd C/H/S configurations these disks have, but if you
>can find info about their C/H/S configuration, you can enter those figures
>manually into the BIOS. I've found the cheapest CF cards through
>TigerDirect here in the US. I got a 128MB card for $7 and a 256MB for
>something like $16. When you add shipping cost, it's of course a bit more
>than that.
>
>James

On the issue of read/write cycles on CompactFlash and other flash-type 
media...

I've been doing research on this, and the reputed number of cycles 
before failure has gone up by an oder of magnitude from the early 
versions of the media - from <10K writes up to >100K writes, so that 
should not be an issue.   Still don't know if I'd use one for a swap 
file or partition, since writes aren't all _that_ fast, but it would 
work.

Anthony Albert
===========================================================
Anthony J. Albert                     albert AT umpi.maine.edu
Systems and Software Support Specialist          Postmaster
Computer Services - University of Maine, Presque Isle
        "This is only temporary, unless it works."
                        --- Red Green