[Soekris] hard disk & wifi card

[Stuart Henderson]

On 2006/07/10 10:08, Breen Ouellette wrote:
> I suggest you use a Seagate HD. As has been noted on this list, the 
> Seagates tend to do better with being run 24/7. A lot of other brands 
> will crap out with that kind of usage.

I've had IBM, Seagate, and Fujitsu drives die in 4801s. In my case
the Seagate Momentus did least well and made a horrible whiny noise.
Fujitsu 4200rpm lasted the longest and was the quietest, but
even the best just doesn't seem right for this type of box unless
you power them down most of the time.

> The great thing about having an HD is there is no more fussing around 
> with CF write issues, probably the reason you are going this route. 

Which particular write issues? They're slow, but it's not like
you'll be writing that much to them from a firewall. And it's been
years since you /really/ had to worry about the number of writes
(noatime and not swapping to flash, but don't really need more
than that - unless you want to mount read-only to avoid fsck on
unclean shutdown; but that applies to normal HDs too).

I've just pulled 64mb CF-cards from some old EPIA DNS servers to
upgrade things (not because of failure) - they're labelled 2003-02
and have had config updates rewritten every half hour or so
(mount/write cpio.gz/umount). These are not even brand-name CFs,
just whatever was most easily available at the time.