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Old 22nd July 2008
Darwimy Darwimy is offline
Port Guard
 
Join Date: Jun 2008
Location: Germany
Posts: 36
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I am running FreeBSD from CF cards for several years now, mainly as hard disk replacements in firewalls / routers. Some devices like PC Engines' WRAP require the use of CF cards for storage.

A week ago I replaced the hard disk in the laptop I use as 24x7 torrent server with a 8 GB SSD from Transcend. Performance is weak (15 MB/s write, 18 MB/s read) compared to a modern 2,5" hard disk.

It was "cheap" (80 EUR) compared to other SSDs. But if you go for a CF card with 8GB built from SLC flash cells (not MLC like on cheap CFs) and an CF-to-IDE converter you end up spending nearly the same. And it supports UDMA33 thus lowering CPU usage (with an 550 MHz PIII this is an issue) compared to CF cards using PIO modes.

Although I think that this device uses modern wear-leveling algorithms I mount / read-only, have /var mounted as RAM disk, and the writable part mounted with the 'noatime' option set. Also, I really like syslog with support for circular log files.
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