gm_sjo wrote:
> Sorry, one thing I forgot to ask- How safe would it be to run Solaris
> from a flash device (either CF<>ATAPI or USB Flash)? Is there any
> recommended practise for doing this? Not sure if there's an embedded
> guideline/distribution. I'm looking at a 4 drive enclosure but I dont
> want the o/s on that storage (don't think I even can with zfs, can I?)

There are no formal guidelines that I know of.  Sun actually has now
started giving out OpenSolaris on USB sticks at conferences rather than
CD; Belenix has a great "run from stick" distro option.

I will say that I benchmarked several USB sticks that I've bought and
collected, and used IDE/CF adapters.... conventional flash isn't as fast
as you'd think.  The latency is low, but the throughput is really poor,
like 10MB/s poor. 

Thats my experience anyway.  I'd personally opt for a cheap 7,200 RPM
disk over an flash card.  SSD's of course are a different story.

That said... for the purpose of data transport I use USB all the time. 
I have ZFS Zpool's on my USB Sticks and iPods.  I even bought a pack of
4 1GB USB sticks, put them on a key ring, and then plug them all in as a
single 3.sometingGB RAIDZ Pool... this combined with compression is
awesome!  Plus, it works with my Mac. :)

If your serious about flash storage, I'd recommend checking out NewEgg's
deals on cheap SSD; they are down under $200 now.

benr.

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