My own experince with microdrives is that they die quicker than flash
drives, at every opertunity they try to park the heads and IIRC from
reading the datasheet its rated to 300k head parks, when listening to
mp3's on the zaurus c3000 you hit that pretty quickly
i did end up replacing the microdrive with a cf card on a brand new
zarus and moving the micro drive to the slug (so i could ahve a swap
file) howeer had to ditch it after the drive died (tick of death)
if you do go down the microdrive, make sure you apply those flash
hacks to prevent writing to disk, they will make the drive last longer
as a side note, CF cards tend to last longer as a swap file than SD
cards do (or at least they did a couple of years back) we belive it
had to do with the quality of the flash chips and drive controllers
(which at the time were of much higher quality than SD cards, sandisk
SD cards came close but were still beaten by a mid range CF card)
another side note, IIRC a microdrive cost 3-5 times more than a CF
card and few cards were avalible in the same capacity
On Wed, Jan 05, 2011 at 06:55:19PM -0000, dystopianrebel wrote:
> "Ralph & Maria Finch", I think these are the points in favour of using a Hitachi microdrive:
>
> - the size (4, 6, or 8 GB) is just right for a boot disk; a second disk could be a Flash stick for storage of large (mostly static) files
>
> - I don't have to fiddle with the OS to reduce writes to disk; the OS runs as intended
>
> - I don't have to guess about a Flash drive's quality or ability to manage wear (lifetime warranties don't appear to be offered for Flash memory anymore, so I have no great confidence in them)
>
> Flash memory is cheaper in 2011 than it was in 2006 when I set up my Slugs. Flash now has significantly higher capacity. That said, the microdrive solution has worked well for me, so I can recommend it in good faith.
>
> And that, in the end, is the best I can do for a total stranger asking for help on the World Wide Turing Test.
>
>
>
>
>
> --- In nslu2-linux@yahoogroups.com, "Ralph & Maria Finch" <ralphmariafinch@...> wrote:
> >
> > I just wonder why consider a Microdrive when they are such low capacity
> > (2GB-6GB from a quick google search). USB Flash Drives are 10 times the size
> > for roughly the same price. As to reliability I just periodically make an
> > image backup of everything, the procedure is documented on the NSLU2 wiki.
> > I've been running my Slug for a couple of years now, 24/7, with 2 USB flash
> > drives, no problems. I use it mainly as a proxy server and sometimes for
> > torrent downloads.
>
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