[Soekris] Choosing Compact flash (Was: Memory upgrade)

[Wim Vandeputte - Mailinglists only]

hey,

On Mon, Dec 17, 2007 at 03:51:49PM +0100, Pontus Pihlgren wrote:
> Now it's time to choose a CF card. I'm considering either 2 GB or 4 GB. 
> I'll try to run vanilla OpenBSD, so I expect at least 1 GB to be 
> necessary for the base install. What are your experience? Is it nice to 
> have the extra headroom the 4GB gives?

OpenBSD will just fit on 512 MB, including the compiler and docs.
But that is just a bit too small when you do a recompile (due to files kept
open by running processes). 

1 GB is just fine

Filesystem     Size    Used   Avail Capacity  Mounted on
/dev/wd1a      394M   37.9M    336M    10%    /
/dev/wd1h      349M   46.0K    331M     0%    /home
/dev/wd1d     1008M    448M    510M    47%    /usr
/dev/wd1e      508M    9.5M    473M     2%    /var
mfs:32145      9.5M   10.0K    9.5M     0%    /tmp

You can keep

/dev/wd1g     1009M    2.0K    958M     0%    /usr/obj
/dev/wd1f      690M    630M   25.4M    96%    /usr/src

on a cheaper USB memory stick (even keep the compiler on there if you are
paranoid)

If you want a full /usr/src and /usr/obj, you can get away with 2 GB
but only if you have a custom /etc/mk.conf where you disable the DEBUG
that bloats the libs

> Also, how important is speed? I think a read speed of 20 MB/s is quite 
> sufficient, no?

Speed is the least of my worries, you boot a system only once and usually
you don't really care much about reads (perhaps more the writes).

I prefer industrial grade CF with wear leveling algorithms but they are
more expensive than consumer grade CF.