[Soekris] hard disk & wifi card

[Stanislav Meduna]

Breen Ouellette wrote:

> While noatime on it's own makes a difference to the amount of writes, it 
> doesn't make the flash card more write friendly than an HD, it just cuts 
> down on the number of writes that normally take place. To truly protect 
> the card you have to replace 'rw' with 'ro', and then deal with the 
> baggage which that decision brings with it.

I don't want to truly protect the card, I want to make it last
significantly more than an average HD. Which is easily done
using noatime and a few tweaks with vm.* sysctl-s (on Linux;
I assume there are similar settings for *BSD). The best test
is trying this with HD - it is quite easy to get it to spin up
every 10 minutes or so, which translates to 50 000 writes/year.

> For someone in my position - enough knowledge to know what's bad, but 
> not necessarily enough to make sure things don't go bad, and more than 
> willing to hack the case with a dremel and/or drill - a HD is a great 
> option. It works great, and burns half the calories (in the form of 
> stress).  :)

After finding out that the HD temp can easily reach 70+ Celsius
on a larger tar cvfj ... and frying two HDs in the 4801 I hacked
the case and added a few holes and a fan. _And_ I splitted the
installation so that the core runs from a CF - using the HD
only for space-hungry things like mail, database etc., so I can
log into the thing even if the next HD says goodbye to me.

Fact is, the default 4801 case is too hot for a HD - even for
the 4200 rpm one. Don't try it without adding an extra fan or two
and monitor the HDD temp (for the case the fan gets stuck).

-- 
                                       Stano