On Tue, 01 Jul 2003, Jason Parker-Burlingham wrote:
> While attempting to recover an unjournalled filesystem last week, it
> occurred to me that it should be possible to store the XFS log on a
> simple solid-state device.
[...]
> A little talk on a local LUG list pointed out that these things often
> have a limited number of write cycles, typically in the millions. One
> poster suggested that write levelling could reduce the impact of this
> limitation
Any of the off-the-shelf devices that emulate mass storage on flash do
their own internal wear leveling, because otherwise the first few
blocks, where Windows puts the FAT, die very quickly...
[...]
> 0) Will this really be useful? My hope is that storing the log on a
> device which doesn't use the IDE bus will save the log from
> becoming corrupted when the IDE disks start to fail.
Very, very few IDE disk failures cause bus corruption.
[...]
> 3) Is there some other technology suitable for the small office
> situation which might fill this need?
You will almost certainly get better performance with a compact flash or
PCMCIA flash card attached to a PCMCIA socket or to the IDE bus
directly.
Daniel
--
We are always getting ready to live, but never living.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson, _Journals_, 1834
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