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

[Pontus Pihlgren]

Wim Vandeputte - Mailinglists only skrev:
> 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.
>   
Sounds like I should go for a slower 4GB for the extra headroom. Or, if 
I compile what I need on another machine, I could do with 2GB (even less).

Wear leveling would be nice, but it looks like it might be cheaper to 
make backups and buy a new card in case of failure.

Regards,
Pontus