Re: [pfSense] fast CF cards?
On 6 Nov 2012, at 19:24, David Burgess apt@gmail.com wrote: With that in mind, can anybody recommend a CF card with good write speed and good reliability? We've used a mix of Sandisk, Transcend and Kingston cards over the years. Of those: - nearly all the Kingston cards have failed sooner or later - some after just a few months, some after several years - we've only had 1 Transcend card fail (out of a few dozen) - none of the Sandisk cards have failed It's difficult to give an accurate view regarding speed, as many of the cards in our sample have been bought over several years, and CF cards have tended to get faster in recent years (so comparing a 5 year old Sandisk with a brand new Transcend isn't really fair). I will say that Sandisk cards are much 'truer' to their rated speed than the other two. I did some tests a few months ago (admittedly for photography rather than pfSense) and I found that the Transcend and Duracell 600x cards were less than half their rated speeds. On the other hand, Transcend cards are usually available for less than 10 GBP, which if you're ordering lots of them, is a consideration. Kind regards, Chris -- This email is made from 100% recycled electrons ___ List mailing list List@lists.pfsense.org http://lists.pfsense.org/mailman/listinfo/list
Re: [pfSense] fast CF cards?
On Nov 7, 2012, at 1:59 AM, Chris Bagnall pfse...@lists.minotaur.cc wrote: On the other hand, Transcend cards are usually available for less than 10 GBP, which if you're ordering lots of them, is a consideration. We order a lot of CF (1,000 at a time), we don't buy Transcend or on price alone. We've also never had a Kingston CF fail that I know of. Jim ___ List mailing list List@lists.pfsense.org http://lists.pfsense.org/mailman/listinfo/list
Re: [pfSense] fast CF cards?
On Wed, Nov 7, 2012 at 9:46 AM, Jim Thompson j...@netgate.com wrote: We've also never had a Kingston CF fail that I know of. Thanks, everybody, for the feedback. I settled on a Sandisk 200x 8GB. There were some Kingston's available with much faster ratings, but after reading some reviews of them, it seems the Kingston are often much slower than they claim. I've also read that Kingston has a reputation for buying whatever flash happens to be available, resulting in poor consistency. I'd just rather stick to something with consistently good reviews, and Sandisk appears to fit that bill. For the record, my current CF is a Lexar Pro 2GB. Reliability has been impeccable in the current build, but not so much in a net5501. I have a Lexar Pro 4GB in the net5501 currently, and it seems to be fine after a few years. I can't comment on the speed of either of these, as I've never done any objective testing; all I can say is that anything less than an instant firmware update is too slow. ;) db ___ List mailing list List@lists.pfsense.org http://lists.pfsense.org/mailman/listinfo/list
Re: [pfSense] fast CF cards?
On 11/6/2012 2:24 PM, David Burgess wrote: My CF card is getting to be a few years old now, and I really should have a backup ready to go. I really hate slow IO in any machine, and I don't like long drawn-out firmware updates (especially since I'm usually up at 4 am doing them). With that in mind, can anybody recommend a CF card with good write speed and good reliability? I'm not interested in paying $100, as this is an itx machine and for that money I could just jump to an SSD. My favourite vendor has a good selection of Kingston, but I really don't like that brand for anything other than RAM. If anybody knows of something decent under $40, I welcome your recommendation. Thanks. I have a Sandisk 200x (30MB/s) 4gb card here that is very speedy. However, it has an annoying quirk with the disk layout that makes FreeBSD spit an error message on every rw mount. Annoying log spam, but it's still speedy. May just be this model, not sure. Jim ___ List mailing list List@lists.pfsense.org http://lists.pfsense.org/mailman/listinfo/list
Re: [pfSense] fast CF cards?
On Tue, Nov 6, 2012 at 12:30 PM, Jim Pingle li...@pingle.org wrote: I have a Sandisk 200x (30MB/s) 4gb card here that is very speedy. However, it has an annoying quirk with the disk layout that makes FreeBSD spit an error message on every rw mount. Annoying log spam, but it's still speedy. May just be this model, not sure. Thanks for the recommendation. pfsense firmware updates are pretty much pure sequential writes, aren't they? I'm reading reviews and just want to confirm which apecs should matter most for me. db ___ List mailing list List@lists.pfsense.org http://lists.pfsense.org/mailman/listinfo/list
Re: [pfSense] fast CF cards?
I've got a FIrewire 800-based CF gadget, and the SanDisk cards go very fast while running dd to program them with pfSense. The error, isn't, really. The CF reports its entire size, but has kept some sectors in reserve. freeBSD attempts to access these during boot, and the error results. But nothing bad happened. Netgate uses Kingston for the 4GB cards, and SanDisk for the 2GB cards. -- Jim On Nov 6, 2012, at 11:30 AM, Jim Pingle li...@pingle.org wrote: On 11/6/2012 2:24 PM, David Burgess wrote: My CF card is getting to be a few years old now, and I really should have a backup ready to go. I really hate slow IO in any machine, and I don't like long drawn-out firmware updates (especially since I'm usually up at 4 am doing them). With that in mind, can anybody recommend a CF card with good write speed and good reliability? I'm not interested in paying $100, as this is an itx machine and for that money I could just jump to an SSD. My favourite vendor has a good selection of Kingston, but I really don't like that brand for anything other than RAM. If anybody knows of something decent under $40, I welcome your recommendation. Thanks. I have a Sandisk 200x (30MB/s) 4gb card here that is very speedy. However, it has an annoying quirk with the disk layout that makes FreeBSD spit an error message on every rw mount. Annoying log spam, but it's still speedy. May just be this model, not sure. Jim ___ List mailing list List@lists.pfsense.org http://lists.pfsense.org/mailman/listinfo/list ___ List mailing list List@lists.pfsense.org http://lists.pfsense.org/mailman/listinfo/list
Re: [pfSense] fast CF cards?
This may be more than you want cost-wise, but you can pick up smaller SSDs for just barely under $50: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820148579nm_mc=OTC-FroogleNEWcm_mmc=OTC-FroogleNEW-_-Solid+State+Disk-_-Crucial-_-20148579 that's obviously way more space than you need, and much more expensive than your average CF card. On Tue, Nov 6, 2012 at 2:30 PM, Jim Pingle li...@pingle.org wrote: On 11/6/2012 2:24 PM, David Burgess wrote: My CF card is getting to be a few years old now, and I really should have a backup ready to go. I really hate slow IO in any machine, and I don't like long drawn-out firmware updates (especially since I'm usually up at 4 am doing them). With that in mind, can anybody recommend a CF card with good write speed and good reliability? I'm not interested in paying $100, as this is an itx machine and for that money I could just jump to an SSD. My favourite vendor has a good selection of Kingston, but I really don't like that brand for anything other than RAM. If anybody knows of something decent under $40, I welcome your recommendation. Thanks. I have a Sandisk 200x (30MB/s) 4gb card here that is very speedy. However, it has an annoying quirk with the disk layout that makes FreeBSD spit an error message on every rw mount. Annoying log spam, but it's still speedy. May just be this model, not sure. Jim ___ List mailing list List@lists.pfsense.org http://lists.pfsense.org/mailman/listinfo/list ___ List mailing list List@lists.pfsense.org http://lists.pfsense.org/mailman/listinfo/list
Re: [pfSense] fast CF cards?
I did have some issues related to running pfSense off of flash memory on certain motherboards (Jetway NF96-525-FL). It was some off compatibility quirk, the same flash memory worked just fine on another board, and that board was perfectly happy with an old hard drive on the same exact IDE channel. But this was not a case of just a warning log message, on 1.3 it would lock up the firewall once every few days, on 2 it would only boot maybe 1/4 of the time. But if you are currently using a CF card successfully, hopefully a new one will continue to work just fine. On Tue, Nov 6, 2012 at 2:43 PM, Jim Thompson j...@netgate.com wrote: I've got a FIrewire 800-based CF gadget, and the SanDisk cards go very fast while running dd to program them with pfSense. The error, isn't, really. The CF reports its entire size, but has kept some sectors in reserve. freeBSD attempts to access these during boot, and the error results. But nothing bad happened. Netgate uses Kingston for the 4GB cards, and SanDisk for the 2GB cards. -- Jim On Nov 6, 2012, at 11:30 AM, Jim Pingle li...@pingle.org wrote: On 11/6/2012 2:24 PM, David Burgess wrote: My CF card is getting to be a few years old now, and I really should have a backup ready to go. I really hate slow IO in any machine, and I don't like long drawn-out firmware updates (especially since I'm usually up at 4 am doing them). With that in mind, can anybody recommend a CF card with good write speed and good reliability? I'm not interested in paying $100, as this is an itx machine and for that money I could just jump to an SSD. My favourite vendor has a good selection of Kingston, but I really don't like that brand for anything other than RAM. If anybody knows of something decent under $40, I welcome your recommendation. Thanks. I have a Sandisk 200x (30MB/s) 4gb card here that is very speedy. However, it has an annoying quirk with the disk layout that makes FreeBSD spit an error message on every rw mount. Annoying log spam, but it's still speedy. May just be this model, not sure. Jim ___ List mailing list List@lists.pfsense.org http://lists.pfsense.org/mailman/listinfo/list ___ List mailing list List@lists.pfsense.org http://lists.pfsense.org/mailman/listinfo/list ___ List mailing list List@lists.pfsense.org http://lists.pfsense.org/mailman/listinfo/list
