[mythtv-users] New Frontend, Any gotchas with Compact Flash storage

Brian Wood beww at beww.org
Sun Mar 2 15:29:57 UTC 2008


On Mar 2, 2008, at 7:48 AM, Mike Smith wrote:

>
> To add some anecdotal evidence, my heavily-used CF-based frontend  
> has been performing very well. It is completely silent (zero moving  
> parts) and I find bootup times and general performance comparable to  
> a hard drive-based frontend. I didn't do anything special to the  
> file system (it's ext3, and has a small swap partition) and thus far  
> have had no trouble. Setting it up like this may well not be the  
> best idea, as others have said.

My personal experience using flash devices (with an NSLU2) has shown  
that the "conventional wisdom" that it will fail after a short period  
of heavy writes is incorrect. I have been running a complete Debian  
system from a flash device for close to a year now. I guess the wear  
leveling is working.

But having said that, swapping to a flash device is generally  
considered a bad idea. Mounting partitions with the "noatime"  
parameter will also reduce writes, but some applications want the  
access times updated to work properly.

You may have noticed vast price differences between similar capacity  
devices. The differences are speed and the quality (or even the  
existence of)  wear leveling. Of course it can be hard to determine  
these parameters from the package or from a catalog or online listing.

beww



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