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Cc: freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.org, hselasky@c2i.net
Subject: Re: Parking disk drive heads
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On 20 Aug, Eric Anderson wrote:

> As a data point, I've been using 64mb compact flash cards (rated at 100k 
> writes) in about 100 Soekris boxes (running FreeBSD) for about 4 years, 
> and they are all still working, except for one.  Now, most compact flash 
> cards are rated at 1 million writes.
> 
> And yes, I'm logging to the card and everything..

I've been using a laptop drive in my firewall and mail relay box for
noise and power consumption reasons.  The drive specs only give an
expected lifetime of a few years when running 24x7, and I just had to
replace a drive that had been in service about four years.  I've given
some thought to using flash, but I'm concerned about the number of
writes, especially since a mail relay (maybe 1K messages/day) is going
to be somewhat write intensive.  What would be nice is a flash-backed md
device that would flush its contents to flash on power fail.