I just thought I'd share this with folks since I think this is pretty cool and has turned out quite well.
I'm moving to having my library online in FLAC format, which meant moving to a 1TB drive. My server only has 2 SATA ports and and I perfer to have my data and OS drives completely separate, so I felt a bit constrained with no avenue to update my storage other than replace my 1TB drive one day. I'd rather not have a bank of external USB hard drives either. Setting up a separate file server would be a waste of electricity. A friend at work suggested installing the OS on a USB memory key. Hmmm, I never thought of that. It meant that I could keep my 500GB disc in my system and replace the 40GB OS drive with my new 1TB drive. So now I have a 1.5 TB music server! :-). These USB keys are rediculously cheap these days. I got mine in Staples for $25. It is a PNY 8 GB drive - the attache High Speed model. I could have gotten away with a 4 GB, but using 8GB allows the wear levelling to work better - more space to spread out the writes. To install, I disconnected the internal drives, booted the OS DVD, and told it to install on the USB key as though it were an ordinary drive. Nothing special was done. The only glitch I ran into was after the install was done I had to go into repair mode and write the boot sector to the MBR - I don't know why it didn't do it on it's own. I used expert mode with the disc partitioner, so it could have been my mistake. The one issue I was worried about was wearing out the drive running an OS on it; lots of people seem to get wrapped around the axle about this. I found an article that put this into perspective and I'm not worried at all: http://www.corsairmemory.com/_faq/FAQ_flash_drive_wear_leveling.pdf Wear Levelling technology in the controller chips of the drives has all but eliminated the issue. This quote from the article puts it in perspective: "...this would mean that on a fairly typical 8 GByte drive, one would need to write over 21 GBytes of data to it every day for ten years! USB flash drives simply are not used in this way." Even with regular OS updates, music library scans, and log file growth and cycling, this type of usage isn't even approached. A hard disc would probably die sooner of mechanical failure. The result...it works great! Package updates are a little slower than if it were running the OS from a hard disc. I have 1GB or RAM, so it virtually never swaps, so that isn't an issue. It boots just as fast, if not faster than booting from a hard disc. I'm pleased as pie with it :-). -- maggior Rich --------- Setup: 2 SB3s, 1 duet, 1 receiver. SuSE 11.0 Server running SqueezeCenter 7.2.1 and SqueezeSlave. (No MusicIP for now since it throws a segmentation fault when started on SuSE 11.0) http://www.last.fm/user/maggior ------------------------------------------------------------------------ maggior's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=9080 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=55290 _______________________________________________ unix mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/unix
