18 Jan
2007
18 Jan
'07
1:46 p.m.
Rumor has it that 9000 VAX may have mentioned these words:
On 1/18/07, Jim Leonard <trixter at oldskool.org>
wrote:
Ah yes... but if anyone actually *wanted* to support a Classic Computer
company, you could buy them here:
http://www.cloud9tech.com/
Not the cheapest, but hey - they're great guys and can be found over on the
maltedmedia.com CoCo list. At the same time, you could pick up an IDE
interface for your CoCo that has a built-in CF socket right on it...
;-)
Laterz,
Roger "Merch" Merchberger
--
Roger "Merch" Merchberger | "Profile, don't speculate."
SysAdmin, Iceberg Computers | Daniel J. Bernstein
zmerch at 30below.com |
9000 VAX wrote:
From that biggest on-line bazaar that many list members are bashing now for
its lastest BS. After one hour of surfing the internet, I finally
bought 4 IDE-CF
adapters
(laptop and desktop versions, $2 each). One for
the laptop, one for the
pentium PC linux router, one for the 386 desktop.
Just want to share the experience with you so you do not need to waste
the 1
hour as I did.
Where did you find the IDE-CF adapters? I'm in need of a few myself. 
18 Jan
18 Jan
2:03 p.m.
New subject: My 386 laptop HD is dead. The solution: an IDE to CF adapter
On 18 Jan 2007 at 13:46, Roger Merchberger wrote:
Not the cheapest, but hey - they're great guys and
can be found over on the
maltedmedia.com CoCo list. At the same time, you could pick up an IDE
interface for your CoCo that has a built-in CF socket right on it...
What's the life expectancy of a CF card used as a primary hard drive,
for say, a mailserver?
Cheers,
Chuck
3:05 p.m.
Rumor has it that Chuck Guzis may have mentioned these words:
On 18 Jan 2007 at 13:46, Roger Merchberger wrote:
Offtopically -- it depends on the load of the mailserver and what the
spindles (ahem - not a physical spindle in CF's case, but the number & load
of spindles on a mailserver are one of the [if not the] main things a mail
admin considers... I/O is a primary bottleneck in that realm)...
Last time I'd figured on trying to use CF for the queue directory (the
hardest hit on a qmail server) on my mailserver at 10K writes per sector
before gesplosion (;-) on a 1G CF card, I'd figured that it would've lasted
about 2.5 to 3.5 months before bad sectors would start popping up. Doing
research very recently, I've noticed some of the newer superfast CF cards
(The RiData 150x 2G media, specifically) support 100K writes/sector before
wearout, but even then personally I wouldn't chance it.
Now, OTOH, as a boot drive I'm looking at using a 1G CF, reads are
virtually unlimited FWIU, and that would spare me a "secondary use" on the
one 15K RPM HD I do have in a server I'm building.
Ontopically, in a CoCo, they're frelling *Kewl* - even losing 1/2 the
storage of 512byte sectors in RSDOS, you get 255 emulated floppy drives
*and* a 45Meg "hard drive" partition for NitrOS-9 on a 128Meg CF, a
256Megger would be as big as most people could need for both - but
remember, turn off the computer, and swap CF -- you'll have all the storage
you'll ever need, for cheap... 64Meg & 128Meg CF aren't expensive at all
anymore.
[[ I wish I could allocation fundage for a 4G CF card, just to try out a 4G
drive under NitrOS-9... ;-) ]]
Laterz,
Roger "Merch" Merchberger
--
Roger "Merch" Merchberger | Anarchy doesn't scale well. -- Me
zmerch at 30below.com. |
SysAdmin, Iceberg Computers
Not the cheapest, but hey - they're great
guys and can be found over on
the
maltedmedia.com CoCo list. At the same time, you
could pick up an IDE
interface for your CoCo that has a built-in CF socket right on it...
What's the life expectancy of a CF card used as a primary hard drive,
for say, a mailserver? 
20 Jan
20 Jan
10:11 a.m.
New subject: My 386 laptop HD is dead. The solution: an IDE to CF adapter
What's the life expectancy of a CF card used as a
primary hard drive,
for say, a mailserver?
Low, very low.
Remember: You have a hundred thousand or so recordings in each byte of
the card. It has a special mechanism to "distribute wear" but it will come
to an end someday. And when you say about no-flash-oriented software, you
are talking about a lot of writes. And it wears FAST!
22 Jan
22 Jan
7:28 p.m.
New subject: My 386 laptop HD is dead. The solution: an IDE to CF adapter
--- Alexandre Souza <alexandre-listas at e-secure.com.br>
wrote:
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. Don't ask me...
____________________________________________________________________________________
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What's the
life expectancy of a CF card used as a
primary hard drive,
for say, a mailserver?
Low, very low.
Remember: You have a hundred thousand or so
recordings in each byte of
the card. It has a special mechanism to "distribute
wear" but it will come
to an end someday. And when you say about
no-flash-oriented software, you
are talking about a lot of writes. And it wears
FAST!
9:18 p.m.
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 |
10:53 p.m.
Roger Merchberger wrote:
CF has unlimited (or almost nearly-ish) reads. Limited
*writes*. Most of
...with the exception of IBM Microdrives, which are indeed tiny hard
drives. I have a 340MB one from 4 years ago still going strong.
--
Jim Leonard (trixter at oldskool.org) http://www.oldskool.org/
Help our electronic games project: http://www.mobygames.com/
Or check out some trippy MindCandy at http://www.mindcandydvd.com/
A child borne of the home computer wars: http://trixter.wordpress.com/
23 Jan
23 Jan
8:28 a.m.
CF has
unlimited (or almost nearly-ish) reads. Limited *writes*. Most of
...with the
exception of IBM Microdrives, which are indeed tiny hard
drives. I have a 340MB one from 4 years ago still going strong.
11:30 a.m.
Alexandre Souza wrote:
A microdrive shouldn't be called a compactFLASH card, since it has no
flash memory :o)
Not my problem :-) It's a CFII card and behaves like it (although reads
are slower than true flash)
--
Jim Leonard (trixter at oldskool.org) http://www.oldskool.org/
Help our electronic games project: http://www.mobygames.com/
Or check out some trippy MindCandy at http://www.mindcandydvd.com/
A child borne of the home computer wars: http://trixter.wordpress.com/
CF has unlimited (or almost nearly-ish) reads. Limited
*writes*. Most of
...with the exception of IBM Microdrives, which are indeed tiny
hard
drives. I have a 340MB one from 4 years ago still going strong. 
8:38 p.m.
Alexandre Souza wrote:
since it has
I've got a 1GB IBM Microdrive in a digital camera that has been around the
world, taken over 75,000 pictures and that's over five years old, still no
bad sectors. A bit of slowcoach compared to SanDisk UltraIII CF cards, but
the old snapper sits in the glovebox of the car (temps between -10C and
45C), sweet as a nut still.
Dave ;)
>> CF has unlimited (or almost nearly-ish)
reads. Limited *writes*.
>> Most of
> ...with the exception of IBM Microdrives, which are indeed
tiny hard
drives.
I have a 340MB one from 4 years ago still going strong.
A microdrive shouldn't be called a compactFLASH card, no flash memory :o)
Not my problem :-) It's a CFII card and behaves like it
(although reads are slower than true flash)
25 Jan
25 Jan
12:59 a.m.
David Hunt wrote:
I've got a 1GB IBM Microdrive in a digital camera
that has been around the
world, taken over 75,000 pictures and that's over five years old, still no
bad sectors. A bit of slowcoach compared to SanDisk UltraIII CF cards, but
the old snapper sits in the glovebox of the car (temps between -10C and
45C), sweet as a nut still.
Yep! There are only two drawbacks to microdrives:
- Slower than real flash
- Can't use 6000+ feet above sea level (lack of air pressure can make
the drive go wonky or, rarely, break it)
--
Jim Leonard (trixter at oldskool.org) http://www.oldskool.org/
Help our electronic games project: http://www.mobygames.com/
Or check out some trippy MindCandy at http://www.mindcandydvd.com/
A child borne of the home computer wars: http://trixter.wordpress.com/
1:20 a.m.
On 24 Jan 2007 at 23:59, Jim Leonard wrote:
Yep! There are only two drawbacks to microdrives:
- Slower than real flash
- Can't use 6000+ feet above sea level (lack of air pressure can make
the drive go wonky or, rarely, break it)
So, I guess that not many were sold in Flagstaff, AZ? :)
Cheers,
Chuck
1:34 a.m.
New subject: My 386 laptop HD is dead. The solution: an IDE to CF adapter
On 1/25/07, Chuck Guzis <cclist at sydex.com> wrote:
On 24 Jan 2007 at 23:59, Jim Leonard wrote:
Or at the South Pole ;-) (9300 elev, 10000-12000 pressure altitude
due to temp/air density effects).
It's a real problem there - I wouldn't want to take a Microdrive to
that altitude. Personally, my mp3 player was FLASH-based, on purpose,
even though it holds a fraction of the songs of any hard-drive-based
player. In 2005, when I arrived in October, I heard that virtually
every iPod over the winter had a hard drive failure. Those are, IIRC,
1.8" drives. 3.5" desktop and server drives last longer, but we
replaced about one per month in our experiment.
Naturally, I left my HP Kittyhawk at Sea Level.
-ethan
Yep! There are only two drawbacks to
microdrives:
- Slower than real flash
- Can't use 6000+ feet above sea level (lack of air pressure can make
the drive go wonky or, rarely, break it)
So, I guess that not many were sold in Flagstaff, AZ? :) 
9:06 a.m.
New subject: My 386 laptop HD is dead. The solution: an IDE to CF adapter
Jim Leonard wrote:
Yep! There are only two drawbacks to microdrives:
Heh. I remember someone asking me (at work) if a 3.5" ST-506 drive
would work in zero G.
I ask where it was installed and they said a KC-135 :-)
Apparently someone wanted to use one in the "vomit comet"...
and apparently it worked (at least they never complained that
it didn't)
I don't know how high those where pressurized, but I'd guess
around 8000ft. No doubt the old drives didn't need as much
air density; the flying height was not that low. I have no
idea how air pressure affects the boundary layer over the
surface - I assume less density translates to less drag and
then to a lower flight.
-brad
23 Jan
23 Jan
8:34 a.m.
New subject: My 386 laptop HD is dead. The solution: an IDE to CF adapter
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. Don't ask me...
But you CAN have if:
- have enough RAM memory
- Disable virtual memory (a lot less writes on disk!)
- have well-behaved programs
Why don't you give a try? Get the resource kit for the OS you're going
to use and try to limit every write to the disk :o)
And remember: If you have a 256MB disk and are using only 128, all the
other 128 goes for smart remapping of the bad sectors. So if you fry a
sector it will diminish one sector for the total count, but not show you a
bad sector!
8:29 p.m.
New subject: My 386 laptop HD is dead. The solution: an IDE to CF adapter
There's a subproject of the One Laptop Per Child project that is
creating a virtualized swap file with compressed swapped pages. Then
you could swap to a RAM filesystem. It would work well for
uncompressed data but obviously it wouldn't work well for jpgs, pngs,
etc.
The question would be how much precious RAM to dedicate as swap. Or
maybe you could swap to a network file system (slow, but might allow
some programs to run that otherwise would not run at all).
-- John.
24 Jan
24 Jan
12:20 a.m.
New subject: My 386 laptop HD is dead. The solution: an IDE to CF adapter
It was thus said that the Great John R. once stated:
There's a subproject of the One Laptop Per Child
project that is
creating a virtualized swap file with compressed swapped pages. Then
you could swap to a RAM filesystem. It would work well for
uncompressed data but obviously it wouldn't work well for jpgs, pngs,
etc.
The question would be how much precious RAM to dedicate as swap. Or
maybe you could swap to a network file system (slow, but might allow
some programs to run that otherwise would not run at all).
Um ...
Am I missing something here?
Because I'm reminded of this quote (from my quote file):
Oh boy, virtual memory! Now I'm gonna make myself a REALLY BIG ram disk!
-- lennox at shire.hw.stratus.com
Swap is to create the illusion of more memory by using a slower medium
(like disks) to backup the physical RAM. What, exactly, is the point of
swapping RAM to RAM?
-spc (Not doubting the purpose of RAM disks mind you, just swapping
to a RAM disk ... )
12:31 a.m.
New subject: My 386 laptop HD is dead. The solution: an IDE to CF adapter
> There's a subproject of the One Laptop Per
Child project that is
> creating a virtualized swap file with compressed swapped pages. Then
> you could swap to a RAM filesystem. It would work well for
> uncompressed data but obviously it wouldn't work well for jpgs, pngs,
> etc.
Swap is to create the illusion of more memory by
using a slower medium
(like disks) to backup the physical RAM. What, exactly, is the point of
swapping RAM to RAM?
Because it would be compressed on the fly, so theoretically, you'd get
"more RAM out of RAM."
Theoretically. :)
--
--------------------------------- personal: http://www.armory.com/~spectre/ ---
Cameron Kaiser * Floodgap Systems * www.floodgap.com * ckaiser at floodgap.com
-- Everyone is different. No two people are not on fire. -- Strong Bad #84 ----
23 Jan
23 Jan
10:58 a.m.
New subject: My 386 laptop HD is dead. The solution: an IDE to CF adapter
Chris M wrote:
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. Don't ask me...
I have customers who ship embedded systems with CF as the main disk
(linux systems).
Granted, they are not mail servers, but they do things like track gas
pumps, so there is a fair amount of constant activity.
They just "do the math" and replace the CF's before they fail. I don't
know the details but I think they were getting at least 4-5 years out of
them. I think there was some brand-specific factors also (i.e. some
brands have more write cycles).
I too would probably use spinning media for email, but I don't see any
reason why cf would not work for a few years. Heck, most IDE disks these
days only last a few years so a CF can't be worse. (which is why I
raid-1 all my ide data disks)
-brad
20 Jan
20 Jan
10:08 a.m.
Wasn't Cloud9 the company from Steve Woz? AKA: god?
6389
days inactive
6396
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19 comments
11 participants
participants (11)
-
alexandre-listas＠e-secure.com.br -
brad＠heeltoe.com -
cclist＠sydex.com -
chrism3667＠yahoo.com -
dm.hunt＠ntlworld.com -
ethan.dicks＠gmail.com -
jhoger＠gmail.com -
spc＠conman.org -
spectre＠floodgap.com -
trixter＠oldskool.org -
zmerch-cctalk＠30below.com