B
briandorling
Guest
Hi,
currently I am running one "production" Linksys NSLU2 with Debian, and have a second one that I use for testing. Maximum throughput via SMB is about 2-3MB/s. So throughput is low, but power usage is also low as the disk spins down by itself when not in use. Currently it runs as a file server, logging server, Firely MP3 uPNP streamer and does regular automatic backups via Dirvish of all PCs that are switched on around 8pm each evening. It works fine, but I need some new disks, best ones seem to be SATA now, and the Slug does not support SATA (Although I could maybe get an external USB enclosure that does take SATA disks, not looked into that yet). Anyway, a replacement should be low-power, but not in the direction of a blindingly fast NAS (as described in various articles here). So I am also looking at ATOM tests.
What I would like to do is boot the NAS from an SSD. Transcend has them with IDE interface for example. A simple Debian install does not take up too much space, so 4-8GB would do.
My idea would be to have all user data on a green WD 5400 rpm drive. For backup I would rsync that drive to another drive occasionally. Here, power usage etc is too important so I do not want the second drive to be constantly powered on. But for various reasons I favour a disconnected (no cables at all) drive for keeping my data fairly safe.
So, I know about trying to keep the write cycles down on flash drives, and how to do that under Linux. I also cannot see an speed andvantages of using a flash drive. What about power-usage and reliability compared to having a real HD for boot? Of course the idea is to almost never need to boot the NAS, so I do not want a whole hard disk just for a boot partition.
Anyone got any experience of using a flash as boot drive. Opinions?
This is the kind of thing I was thinking about using:
http://www.transcend.de/Products/ModDetail.asp?ModNo=26
Cheers Brian
currently I am running one "production" Linksys NSLU2 with Debian, and have a second one that I use for testing. Maximum throughput via SMB is about 2-3MB/s. So throughput is low, but power usage is also low as the disk spins down by itself when not in use. Currently it runs as a file server, logging server, Firely MP3 uPNP streamer and does regular automatic backups via Dirvish of all PCs that are switched on around 8pm each evening. It works fine, but I need some new disks, best ones seem to be SATA now, and the Slug does not support SATA (Although I could maybe get an external USB enclosure that does take SATA disks, not looked into that yet). Anyway, a replacement should be low-power, but not in the direction of a blindingly fast NAS (as described in various articles here). So I am also looking at ATOM tests.
What I would like to do is boot the NAS from an SSD. Transcend has them with IDE interface for example. A simple Debian install does not take up too much space, so 4-8GB would do.
My idea would be to have all user data on a green WD 5400 rpm drive. For backup I would rsync that drive to another drive occasionally. Here, power usage etc is too important so I do not want the second drive to be constantly powered on. But for various reasons I favour a disconnected (no cables at all) drive for keeping my data fairly safe.
So, I know about trying to keep the write cycles down on flash drives, and how to do that under Linux. I also cannot see an speed andvantages of using a flash drive. What about power-usage and reliability compared to having a real HD for boot? Of course the idea is to almost never need to boot the NAS, so I do not want a whole hard disk just for a boot partition.
Anyone got any experience of using a flash as boot drive. Opinions?
This is the kind of thing I was thinking about using:
http://www.transcend.de/Products/ModDetail.asp?ModNo=26
Cheers Brian