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

[Paul Bender]

Jonathan Heizer wrote:
> 
> 
> Paul Bender wrote:
>> 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.
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> 
> I use a CF card and IDE adapter to run my main FE/SBE machine.  I have 
> some dma issues with the card and/or adapter so it takes a while to 
> boot, but after that it is fast.  To not have to worry about the 
> majority of the writes to the drive, I have a ram disk get created on 
> boot up that is mounted as /var/log and copy a backup of that directory 
> onto the ram drive from the cf disk.  I also have a few other random 
> files linked to that directory that are being written to sometimes.  
> When the machine reboots, it copies the current directory back onto the 
> flash drive.  I am not worried if the machine loses power or for what 
> ever reason does not have a current backup of the ram disk since it is 
> just log files anyway.  Has been working great for a few months for me 
> so far.  I didn't want to mess with net booting or anything else since 
> it does have a tuner and slave duties.

Yes, I believe that is a good solution. In fact, that is what I was 
doing for some time. At some point, I decided to use unionfs and 
pivot_root to make the entire file system read-write. The upside of 
doing this is that I do not need to worry which files need to be 
read-write. The downside of doing this is that it is harder to keep 
track of which files/directories should be backed-up and restored when 
rebooting.