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

[Paul Bender]

Matthew Asplund wrote:
> 
> 
> On Sun, Mar 2, 2008 at 8:57 PM, Paul Bender <pebender at san.rr.com 
> <mailto:pebender at san.rr.com>> wrote:
> 
>     David Whyte wrote:
>      > On Mon, Mar 3, 2008 at 10:21 AM, Ray Lischner
>     <linux at tempest-sw.com <mailto:linux at tempest-sw.com>> wrote:
>      >>  I decided to use a conventional SATA disk drive for my FE. It's
>     cheap,
>      >>  easy, and completely silent because the system doesn't touch
>     the disk
>      >>  once it's up and running. I don't see the disk LED light during
>     normal
>      >>  playback activities.
>      >
>      > Yeah, I am leaning towards this now.  I completely forgot about the
>      > write limitation and I am sceptical of everything going smooth with
>      > the IDE adaptor and the like.  I can get a cheap 80GB IDE Western
>      > Digital HDD for ~$80AUD, which is fine with me.  I doubt myth will
>      > touch the disk after boot up anyways if I put 1GB (or more) of RAM in
>      > it seeing how this is a FE only (at this stage).
>      >
>      > Thanks for all the pointers though guys, I am glad I asked here
>     first.
> 
>     In general, Linux distributions will do things such as write
>     /var/log/messages after they boot. However, if you redirect your syslog
>     to another machine or reconfigure your syslog to log only errors, then
>     you can avoid this.
> 
>     For what it is worth, live distributions and distributions such as
>     MiniMyth are designed to never write their storage medium, because they
>     expect their storage medium to be read only. Therefore, these
>     distributions will only would only write your compact flash storage when
>     you update the distribution.
> 
> Would things be better if there was a small disk in RAM for stuff like 
> /tmp and /var? Then you could pretty much have / be a read-only file 
> system, with all writable stuff copied in the ramdisk and then lost on 
> reboot.

Essentially, that is what live distributions as well as MiniMyth do, 
albeit in a somewhat different fashion. They create a RAM disk that they 
overlay on the entire root file system using a stackable file system 
such as unionfs. This makes the entire file system appear to be 
read-write. However, all changes are lost after reboot.