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Old 3rd July 2008
ocicat ocicat is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by robbak View Post
The main benefit with SSDs is that they are taking more steps to make the flash ram last longer (increasing the read-write cycles), and more load balancing to improve overall disk life. (flash ram 'wears out' over time)
Simple CF cards are not likely to include this level of sophistication. That means that you will wear the card out with standard log file and /tmp wibbling, and, if you end up with swap on them, they will die really quickly.

Many people do use cf and even sd for hard drives successfully, but they are careful to mount the drive read-only, and create RAM drives for areas that really need to be writable.
Heed robbak's comments as these are the issues that anyone creating small (as in just a few GB's of storage...) dependable firewalls needs to consider.

As for purchasing large solid-state drives today for a general-purpose system, if you have the money & really want the experience, go for it. However, reviews by both pundits & developers in-the-know indicate that the performance is underwhelming & the cost is very high in comparison to other popular technologies.

Solid-state storage is about to have it's time in the sun, but that time is not today. The high cost & lack of performance isn't balanced by the benefit of getting away from moving parts, heat, & noise yet.
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