On Mon, 28 Feb 2000, Dennis wrote:
> Flash wears out Pal. Its only more "reliable" as a read-only medium.
You are correct, but this is only part of the argument.
> 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.
Correct
> 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.
Yes
> 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.
The main reasons for flash
Customers often demand it.
Better thermal and shock ratings.
Very easy to boot via initrd to a system running entirely out
of RAM.
Many of my internal routers have a hd, and run a ~ 80MB custom
distro on them.
Most of our custom routers that get sold initrd boot from a
SanDisk loading a compressed 32 or 64 MB image into RAM. Totally
minimal system, mostly config tools, diag tools. Only time flash is
written is saving the configs back to flash, or updating the image.
Again, this is all customer driven, there are valid technical
reasons to go both ways depending on use.
---
As folks might have suspected, not much survives except roaches,
and they don't carry large enough packets fast enough...
--About the Internet and nuclear war.
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