[mythtv-users] Diskless

[Brian Wood]

On Feb 2, 2007, at 4:43 PM, David Brodbeck wrote:

> Brian Wood wrote:
>> Flash-based CF cards are cheap, but: Using a flash device to hold an
>> operating system will work, but the flash device has a finite number
>> of memory write cycles that it will tolerate before it starts to  
>> fail.
>>
>
> I'm aware of that, but in practice the limit seems to be quite  
> high.  We
> used to routinely run Windows 95 (I know, terrible) off flash disks.
> The FAT filesystem is a pretty poor choice for flash because so many
> writes happen in the directory area; however, failed disks were  
> rare and
> we got many years out of them.

Some of the better flash devices have "wear leveling" built-in so  
even when it appears to the OS that you are writing to the same area  
all the time it is actually being "spread out" over the entire device  
to reduce wear on any specific locations.
>
> I agree that you should avoid swapping to flash disks, not just  
> because
> of potentially wearing them out, but also because they're quite slow.
> I'd also recommend using the "noatime" option on Linux filesystems.
> With those caveats, though, I think they make an excellent boot  
> medium.

Yeah it's pretty hard to beat them for the price.