<br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Mon, Nov 23, 2009 at 8:27 AM, Andrew Close <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:aclose@gmail.com">aclose@gmail.com</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
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thanks for the reply and the pointers. netbooting probably is the<br>
next logical step, but i figured the USB stick would be easier for a<br>
novice. i'll definitely check out the link you shared and look up<br>
netbooting as well. maybe it'll save me an extra $30. :)<br></blockquote></div><br><br>That would be my sugestion as well. I have done it with an 8GB OCZ Rally2 USB stick, and it worked fine. I only had one problem with that method, the USB stick would sometimes decide not to enumerate on boot, so I wouldn't have a boot drive. I would have to pull the stick and re-insert to reset it for it to work again. I asked OCZ about it, but all they had to say was "we don't recommend booting from USB flash drives". Other than that one little glitch that I'd only see once a month or so, it worked fine and the stick is quite fast as those things go. <br>
<br>I switched to netbooting and haven't looked back. I don't run swap on either of my frontends. RAM is cheap enough that I just put in a little extra and it works fine without swap. One of my frontends only has 1GB and it's fine. It doesn't have shared video memory though, that machine is using a video card so I can use VDPAU. The one with an onboard video card has 2GB with 512M for video. All data is accessed over gigabit ethernet. The Mythbuntu distro makes it really easy to set up netbooting. I'm sure there are ways to do it on the others as well, that's just the distro I happened to be using anyway. <br>