Twigathy schrieb:
My desktop NFS boots off my fileserver, with a local /boot partition
on a 2GB CompactFlash card in an IDE -> CF adapter bought for pennies
on fleabay. With a partition like /boot that doesn't get written to
very often (Only on kernel updates and initrd changes) I don't see the
write limitations as being too much of a problem. Not sure how well
they would fare in a raid1 setup, but again they'd only be written to
occasionally.
For my SAN servers, I usually have a system installed on a IDE-flash or a
USB-stick; data is stored separately on hard disks.
This way, an operating system is independent of data - in case of any operating
system failure, just replace a small flash module, and you have access to data
again. Having an operating system together with data on any RAID makes recovery
from failures much harder.
Of course, everything depends on your usage.
So far, I had only one problem with worn out flash: I placed RAID bitmap on
flash, and some time later, I had I/O errors when trying to access the bitmap
file. Probably Transcend IDE-flash disks don't do a very clever wear-levelling.
Other than that, I don't have any problems - although some of these systems run
off flash for several years now (including /var/log/).
See also a recent "Compact Flash Question" discussion on lkml.
--
Tomasz Chmielewski
http://wpkg.org
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