[Soekris] hard disk & wifi card

[Farid Hajji]

On Tue, Jul 11, 2006 at 01:02:47AM +0100, Stuart Henderson wrote:
> 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.

An IBM/Hitachi travelstar broke town in a 4801 after 8 months
(I know it would happen, esp. with this brand, but was surprised
how long it lasted), now using Seagates. I wouldn't expect vanilla
off-the-shelf HDDs to last longer than, say, 6 to 10 months of
continuous usage in a 4801 anyway.

> > 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).

If you run Postfix and a few other servers on them, you may not get too
many writes per se, but you can't power then down either, due to the
nature of the traffic. Very unfortunately, Soekris doesn't provide
boards with more than 128 MB/256 MB RAM, which could be quite useful as
a ramdisk (in combination with a decent UPS). I'm using EPIA boards
when I need such a config (collect stuff on ramdisk, then write off
data on disk every 30 or 60 minutes); though EPIAs need more
sophisticated power supplies and are thus less nice.

> 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.

-Farid.