At 10:16 AM 2/27/00 -0500, you wrote:
>I think what he was saying is that HD's in a router is bad, as I agree.
>If a HARD CARD or a ram image could be used fro a epprom that would be
>perfect. Less point where it can fail. The point of haveing a hot Spare
>is good, but the point is there is still that point of failure in the
>mechanical parts. Any downtime is bad downtime.
Flash wears out Pal. Its only more "reliable" as a read-only medium.
This argument is so old and so wrong thats its become totally nauseating.
First of all, tens of thousands of people are doing it (HD-based routers
running unix that is), mostly ISPs who have a much higher requirement than
a corporate network with a lousy T1. Secondly, hard drives today have an
MTBF of 10 years or more, so what is your basis for this widely-held yet
absurd "opinion"?
Most of you "server" folks don't understand the reliability of low-power
ide drives because you use the high-speed scsi drives which are much more
prone to failure. The WD ide drive (which we use in our router) will run
much longer than the usefulness of your router. If you get 1 failure in 500
in a year you are really unlucky. The biggest failure point in a PC based
router is the power supply (especially if you use the $32. taiwanese pieces
of garbage that come with most systems)...using an industrial power supply
is the answer to that.
The big joke is that the "flash" proponants talk about HD routers like they
are meant to last forever...most people will outgrow (or want a faster
model) after a year or less.
Plus, flash wears out and magnetic media doesnt (realistically), so running
a standard unix on flash is not suitable in the very long run...in fact its
more prone to wearing out than a hard drive is failing (~100,000 writes on
average, but could be much less). This requires trade-offs on the
functionaly of your file systems, offloading logs, reduced utilities and an
overally less powerful system. (unless you NFS, which is more of a failure
point that you want) For $180. you can keep a hot-swap hard drive and power
supply and run a full, standard system with a minimal chance of failure and
simple solution if it does. Its a no-brainer.
A flash-based system is more expensive, less functional and simply not much
more reliable, if at all.
Dennis
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