[ale] SSD drive vs. CF Card + ATA interface?

[Jeff Hubbs]

Chris -

I've worked a little with CF via ATA but more recently I've been working 
quite a bit with CF via CardBus, using a 16GB CF card intended 
principally for the pro photo market. 

The thin client in question has a 128MiB bare-card SSD via ATA inside 
the enclosure; I've got /boot on that and / is on the CF card.  
Unfortunately, I have not been able to get DMA on CardBus working on 
this hardware, so the card is only running at about 1/10 the rated speed. 

I have no idea what kind of usable life I expect to get out of the card; 
up to now part of the exercise is to see if a full-featured Gentoo 
instance will run on it for a decent amount of time if reasonable steps 
are taken.  Among those steps have been:

Don't use swap; compile with -Os if you have to and otherwise just 
operate within your RAM limits.
Don't use filesystem journaling; go with ext2 or one of the others if 
you can explicitly disable journaling at mount or format.
Mount all filesystems with -o noatime; file/dir access times probably 
won't be needed and would cause writes with every read (going further, 
some FSses might be better than others with respect to how gratuitously 
they write inodes or equivalent). 
Don't install slocate.
Set your apps to their minimum practical logging level.



Chris Woodfield wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Looking at building a new mini-ITX router/firewall - trying to  
> eliminate moving parts as much as I can. So I'm looking to use a  
> fanless CPU, flash-based storage device for the OS, etc.