The amount of discussion this topic has generated is astounding. Many of the messages have debated the merits and shortcomings of solid state vs. microdrives. Bottom line: all drives fail. ALL. ("On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.") Which leaves you with a mitigation strategy (RAID or some kind of failover) or a backup strategy.
As was suggested previously, taking regular backups is a fine strategy, documented on the wiki, and useful regardless of the media you decide to run your NSLU2. I take regular backups of my system, which is running on a 1Gb Transcend Jet Flash USB thumbdrive. It has been more or less running 24x7 since 2007 without a problem. Adequately impressed by the Transcend product, about a year ago I bought 3 more 2Gb drives for about $5 each. You can get 4Gb Transcend drives on Amazon currently for the same price. An Hitachi 6 Gb drive (the only one I saw available from an OEM reseller) runs about $180.
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.
From: nslu2-linux@yahoogroups.com [mailto:nslu2-linux@yahoogroups.com] On Behalf Of dystopianrebel
Sent: Monday, January 03, 2011 8:52 PMSubject: [nslu2-linux] Re: Low power / quiet drive
--- In nslu2-linux@yahoogroups.com, Doug <dsc3507@...> wrote:
>
> Well the microdrives are small and low power but I am not sure they are more
> reliable. It seems there is a bunch of opinions on that.
I don't know about opinions (there's one for every monkey), but I know that mine have been highly reliable for about five years. I run Web servers on them.
Microdrives are known to require careful handling -- they won't survive a drop that a Flash drive can survive. So any use that requires tumbling from a balcony would eliminate microdrives. Apart from that, I suggest not heeding unsubstantiated opinion. Microdrives work. (o:
No comments:
Post a Comment