[Soekris] "Squashed" versions of FreeBSD

[Joel Jaeggli]

Crist J. Clark wrote:
> On Fri, Jul 04, 2008 at 11:28:15AM +0200, Arnt Gulbrandsen wrote:
>> Crist J. Clark writes:
>>> My only real worry is that I've not broken out all of the stuff from 
>>> the /var that I should and I may get "dead spots" on my CF from too 
>>> many write-cycles earlier than I need to, but at $40, it's a risk I 
>>> can take. I'd be curious about any advice on that front.
>> $40 isn't much. The sudden and unexpected downtime if/when the box 
>> breaks may be a great deal worse. Depends how simple and cheap it will 
>> be to get it back up.
> 
> I may be wrong, but I didn't think the failure mode would be
> a "sudden and unexpected" downtime. I had assumed I'd start to
> see read/write errors like you see when a HDD slowly gets
> bad sectors. However, rethinking that, I'm not sure what to
> expect.

If your CF card supports smart you should see it report the remapping of 
  bad sectors as well as correctable and uncorrectable errors.

At this point a high capacity industrial cf card with a decent write 
shadowing and wear leveling implementation ought to last many years in 
the role you're describing...