Rumor has it that Chris M may have mentioned these words:
--- Alexandre Souza <alexandre-listas at
e-secure.com.br>
wrote:
> > What's the life expectancy of a CF card used as a
> primary hard drive,
> > for say, a mailserver?
>
> Low, very low.
I agree... see my previous lengthy post in this thread.
[snippage]
This is what I was made to understand, but there was
a guy on some yahoo group (for Stylistics or some
"slate" computer I think) who claimed he knew someone
who used a flash card w/Win95 or 98 installed, and got
a year or two out of it.
Ungh.
Rule 1: Win9x != "mail server." These are two totally fscking different
applications, so of course one could *easily* get a year or two out of a
Win9x install!
CF has unlimited (or almost nearly-ish) reads. Limited *writes*. Most of
Win9x is reading, except for the occasional temp file, and if he'd disabled
that pitiful excuse for "virtual memory" in Win9x, he'd prolly gotten
another 6 months to a year (at least) outta the sucker.
If he'd wanted to get even longer usage, said "guy on yahoo group[1]" he
should have gone to
www.litepc.com, where he could've had Win9x booting
from a 64Meg Flash drive as an embedded system...
Anyone with half-a-mind of how a computer actually works and can configure
Win9x as such (read: most (all?) of this list) could prolly have gotten
6-10 years outta the rascal.... remember, CF suffers from bitrot just like
the ol' FAMOS [E]EPROMS. Similar tech, just without the UV or high
reprogramming voltages.
I know mailservers. Jay knows mailservers. I started on sendmail back
before they tried to make it easier to configure. They don't call the
sendmail.cf file an "explosion at a punctuation factory" for nuthin'. ;-)
Most (all?) mailserver daemons are hard on a drive. Sendmail is hard on a
drive[2]. qmail, which (when I started using it nearly 10 years ago) was
much easier to install & configure, is actually harder on drive,
/particularly/ where you put the main mail queue.
The writes a mailserver is going to put on a drive (especially where your
main queue is) is going to be somewhere between 100x to 1000x what a Win9x
box is going to require of the drive.
To put a quick close to this longwinded pointlessness, mailservers is why
they invented SCSI. ;-)
Clear as mud now???
Laterz,
Roger "Merch" Merchberger
[1] Sweet Mother O' Pearl, if that doesn't send up some *serious* red flags
for crimeny's sake... Ungh.
[2] This is *not* a sendmail-bashing thread. Jay does very well with it, he
are sendmail ekspurt. I are qmail exspurt. I got my first real "admin job"
- 3 Solaris 2.5 (SunOS 5.5, IIRC) Netra pizza boxen - because I knew
something "kinda Unix-like" -> MicroWare OS-9 on my Tandy CoCos. Other than
that, I was a noob with a capital N, and taking care of sendmail was *way*
beyond my simplistic comprehension of Unix.
P.S....
Don't ask me...
Then why ask us? To me, that reads the same as someone saying: "Don't ask
me, I only work here." If you work there, you *oughtta* know, right??? ;-)
--
Roger "Merch" Merchberger | "Profile, don't speculate."
SysAdmin, Iceberg Computers | Daniel J. Bernstein
zmerch at
30below.com |