On May 18, 2012, at 9:02 AM, Eric Malkowski wrote [snip] > For storage I was thinking of just getting two of the Transcend 32GB MLC > mSATA SSD mini-pci express cards Soekris sells. Set it up with software > RAID-1. Am I crazy to do this? Log data and DHCP lease storage will be > the most common reason for writes -- logs can do plenty of writes if > firewall rules trigger logs / SSH failed attempts things like that. > With recent filesystems being careful not to update inodes when atime > changes, the flash shouldn't see too much activity beyond log writes. > Would I be better off with two 2.5" hard drives instead? I'm totally > fine with hard drives instead of the flash drives. [snip] > > Oh -- in case you are wondering, the 5501 has a CF card with Fedora 8 > install where I change the mount options for noatime and set it up so > the /var/log structure is replicated in a ramdisk at boot time. It's > resulted in very few writes to the CF card over years of uptime (easy to > tell by watching IRQ counts in /proc/interrupts for the IDE). [snip]
One thing to consider if going the SSD route is continuing to use a small RAM disk for /var/log, but also configure syslogd to send a duplicate of the log over one of the internal network ports to another syslogd running on a server with spinning storage. Or you could NFS mount a partition at /var/log from that server. The latter might require tweaking the RC script ordering depending on when the NFS mounts occur with respect to starting syslogd. In any event, you don't have to let /var/log drive your decision making. I would lean toward the SSD solution myself for no other reason than less moving parts. -Jed _______________________________________________ Soekris-tech mailing list [email protected] http://lists.soekris.com/mailman/listinfo/soekris-tech
