In message <2000...@staff.texas.net> Douglas Swarin writes: : Ideally, I would use one of the IDE flash-based drives on the market. One : brand is SanDisk, and they take a standard IDE connector and fit into a : 3.5" drive bay. You can get them very reasonably priced up to 128MB or : so, which is just fine for a boot partition. Since flash drives have no : moving parts, mechanical failure is not an issue, and since the root : partition is not written to much, the flash will not wear out for a : long time (flash cells wear out after about 100,000 writes; the flash : drives do load balancing and stuff to ensure that the (many) cells in : the drive are written to evenly).

We use these devices heavily at Timing Solutions. Or rather we use a IDE <-> CF adapter and haven't had any devices wear out. And some of these devices have had rather heavy use. I think that it is closer to 1 million writes per cell, but I don't have my spec sheets handy.

Are you sure that they do write balancing? The indications I have from the base chip technology is that they don't. I could have missed that in the data sheets. It has been a little while since I looked at them, so I might be misremembering. I can't seem to find the data sheets I looked at before.

In any event, this works well. I usually have / be read only. This can be practacle if you don't have any users that desire to change their passwords... Since I have serveral machines that have an extremely limited number of users on, this works well. One can also mount / rw if you need to do maintenance on it for whatever reason.

Warner

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