[LAU] Advice on hardwware components

[david]

Alexandre DENIS wrote:
> On Monday 21 May 2007, david wrote:
>> Michael Nelson wrote:
>>> I'm interested in using a CompactFlash-to-SATA adapter, and booting
>>> from a CF card. Does anyone know what the speed/reliability would
>>> be like?
>> I think it would be pretty slow - my CF cards seem to give only
>> 5-6MB/sec transfer. Even my slowest hard drives run a LOT faster than
>> that.
> 
> The new Samsung NSSD achieve much better performance: read=53MB/s, 
> write=30MB/s with 0.24ms access time.
> <http://www.samsung.com/Products/Semiconductor/FlashSSD/ModuleType.htm>

Yes, SD is faster than CF.

>> Plus - CF has a limited lifespan when it comes to writing to the
>> card.
> 
> Modern SSD all use Wear Leveling to improve the lifespan, to get 
> actually better results than hard disks now.

At least that's the claim. We'll see! In my relatively short (5 years) 
use of assorted solid state memory - I've had one CF card fail and one 
hard drive fail. The hard drive was about 8 years of old and had been 
very heavily used during its lifetime. The CF card wasn't even a year 
old ...

> The only drawback to SSD is the price: 600EUR for 32GB is not really 
> cheap.

No, it's not! I think a hard drive is the most cost-effective choice.

What I like about the solid state devices is that they're physically 
very tough - almost indestructible.

-- 
David
gnome at hawaii.rr.com
authenticity, honesty, community