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

[Paul Bender]

David Whyte wrote:
> On Mon, Mar 3, 2008 at 10:21 AM, Ray Lischner <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.