On 7 Aug 2001, at 8:50, Bob George wrote:
>"Anthony J. Albert" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>> [...]
>> I have purchased an adaptor that does this quite nicely. Using an 8MB
>> CF card, and the adaptor, I was able to get my old 386 up and running
>> with DOS 6.22 in about 30 minutes. Most of the time was simply running
>> the DOS 6.22 install program, copying the files from the installation
>> floppies to the CF device. It boots amazingly quickly to a DOS prompt,
>> but it otherwise indistiguishable from an IDE drive. fdisk, format,
>> copy, etc., all work just like you'd expect.
>
>Hey, thanks for the review! I'd been worried after reading an article that
>implied they were not (somehow) compatible with Linux fdisk. Did you try
>that by any chance?
No, I haven't (yet!) tried it with the Linux fdisk, though I do intend
to get around to that at some point. It should work fine, though, as
the CF spec for IDE mode includes all the IDE commands. The adaptor
doesn't have any active logic parts on it - it doesn't need them.
There's only a couple of caps, resistors, a power connector, and
sockets for both the CF device and the IDE cable. That's it. It's an
elegant design, thanks to foresight on the part of the CF designers.
>> CF does have a limited life cycle of # or erases for each sector of the
>> physical media, but I believe this is generally over 10,000, and so
>> should not be a factor, except in the most extreme use. However, it's
>> no more work to pull and replace the CF device than it is a hard drive,
>> so that shouldn't be too much of a problem.
>
>Good point. I may consider buying two for my firewall. One with a "big" CF
>mounted for normal use, and another with a "small" CF for swap file and such
>that sees a lot of usage, or I'll want to put up a RAM disk for temp files
>and such. The box in question (P120) will host 96MB RAM, so I should be OK.
You've probably got a good solution, having the second, smaller,
cheaper, CF for temporary files. Another option I'd suggest is using a
RAM disk, with no swap. With the RAM you have available, I don't think
you'll need all of it for just operating the firewall, so there should
be enough left over for a moderate RAM disk to hold the log files.
Mount it as /var and you should be fine, I believe. Depends on how
large your log files will be, and how much you're worried about power
outs.
There are folks that make DRAM-based hard drive replacments,
with battery backup, so they're almost the same as flash
memory, but the prices start at four or five figures, and go up from
there. For businesses with a lot of transactions, though, it's well
worth it for the speed-up it provides for storing log files and
transaction back-out files and database indexes. All of the solutions
seem to be SCSI based, though - I've not seen an IDE one. And the
battery backup generally is aimed at "just long enough to get through a
power outage" - usually, a hard drive is included, so that the
controller can back up the DRAM to the hard drive, in case of extended
power failure.
I've been considering using one of these CF + IDE adaptor combinations
as the basis for storage for the TRS-80 Model 4P that I've pulled out
of storage. 16MB on a CF card would be more storage than you could
purchase with the TRS-80 - if I recall correctly, Radio Shack sold 5MB
and 10MB hard drives at the time, with third-party vendors offering
15MB and 20MB drives, for those that needed truly _HUGE_ amounts of
storage. *grin*
<SNIP>
Glad I could help out someone!
Anthony J. Albert
==============================================================
Anthony J. Albert [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Systems and Software Support Specialist Postmaster
Computer Services - University of Maine, Presque Isle
"Civilization is just a slow process of learning to
be kind." - Charles L. Lucas
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