Killing a CF card

[Technoid]

My current miniATX smoothwal (Duron 800, 256mbsdram,3gb laptop hdd) has come to its end with swollen caps, it behaves really weird now

So I bought a used Via Eden 1ghz mini ITX computer from a coworker who wasn't using it.

And I also bought an CF to IDE adapter (a non DMA but it was all that was in stock atm ) and a 1gb cf card.

The idea we had was to just run it and see how long time until it died

The funny thing is that now the Old smoothwall has been working perfectly

On the smoothwall forums I found instructions on making the log files go to a ramdisk and even a mod that runs the whole OS on a ramdisk

What irks me is that everyone "knows" that its bad to use a cf card as a disk cause the "limited" rewrite limits will ruin it in days or months but I haven't found anyone who has actually done it!!

So I'm really tempted to just install on the cf, write down the date and leave it until it dies

[Wulfman]

at least it would be easy to keep a backup image.

where did you buy your adapter? I ordered some at dealextreme, never thought it would be possible to get them that cheap.

mfg
wulfman

[MultimediaMan]

I suspect it would last a long time... since the log files are appended to instead of actually rewritten, I don't see where you would run into longevity problems. The EXT2 FS is a nice file system.

The only thing I would do is turn of the proxy server cache because of the relatively slow write times of CF devices.

As far CF to IDE adapters, the CF Cards are actually pin-compatible with IDE (with extra pins for power and longer grounding/alignment pins). It is the flash media itself which determines whether or not the controller can or cannot run in DMA mode.

[Technoid]

I suspect it would last a long time... since the log files are appended to instead of actually rewritten, I don't see where you would run into longevity problems. The EXT2 FS is a nice file system.

The only thing I would do is turn of the proxy server cache because of the relatively slow write times of CF devices.

Every time I tried the cahce system at work (where we have more than 1 constantly used computer) we had lots of weirdness so I always keep it off

As far CF to IDE adapters, the CF Cards are actually pin-compatible with IDE (with extra pins for power and longer grounding/alignment pins). It is the flash media itself which determines whether or not the controller can or cannot run in DMA mode.

That's funny, since the one I got was said in the description to not support DMA
And a more expensive one that was not in stock explicitly said that it supported DMA I assumed it had to do with the adapter

I had to change the fan on the cpu, (a 40x40mm 4000rpm) cause it sounded horribly

To make it worse it was already run at 5v instead of 12, at 12v and 6000rpm it made a good impersonation of a vacuum cleaner

I put a silent Sunon 40x40mm 3500rpm fan on instead

when I load the cpu it tops out at 41 celcius and howers at 37