[gentoo-amd64] OT - Which is better CF or thumb drive?

[gentoo-amd64] OT - Which is better CF or thumb drive?

[P.V.Anthony]

Hi,

So far I have building servers for internal use, using Compact Flash on
IDE connector. Using ext3 file system. Only about a year of use. So far
it is great.

Just got a simple cheap Dell tower server with AMD opteron chip. The
motherboard has no IDE connector. I think more and more motherboards are
coming with only SATA connectors.

The good thing is that the motherboard has a internal usb connector.
That means that a 4Gb thumb drive can be connected onto the motherboard
internally.

Now I have a choice of getting a SATA to CF adaptor or just a thumb
drive. Which way should I go? Thumb Drive or CF?

Second problem.

I loved using CF on IDE because of the the drive is called hda instead
of sda. This way it is very easy to call on the hda to boot up without
confusing with the data drives on the SATA.

Need to find a way to fix the naming of the drives regardless of how
many drives are connected. I always had the problem of the names of
drives changing when one of the drives is removed and then rebooted. It
will try to boot up from the wrong drive. If anyone knows of the
solution, please share.

P.V.Anthony
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Re: [gentoo-amd64] OT - Which is better CF or thumb drive?

[Florian Philipp]

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On Wed, 28 May 2008 01:14:01 +0800
"P.V.Anthony" <pvantony@singnet.com.sg> wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> So far I have building servers for internal use, using Compact Flash
> on IDE connector. Using ext3 file system. Only about a year of use.
> So far it is great.

Ext3? You know that journalling will cause additional wear? I'd use
Ext2 but it might depend on your use-cases which will happen more
frequently: data loss through worn-out flash memory or data loss
through corrupted filesystems after a crash.
> 
> Just got a simple cheap Dell tower server with AMD opteron chip. The
> motherboard has no IDE connector. I think more and more motherboards
> are coming with only SATA connectors.
> 
> The good thing is that the motherboard has a internal usb connector.
> That means that a 4Gb thumb drive can be connected onto the
> motherboard internally.
> 
> Now I have a choice of getting a SATA to CF adaptor or just a thumb
> drive. Which way should I go? Thumb Drive or CF?

Hmm, I found thumb drives to be cheaper than CF and faster as long as
you don't use those really expensive CFs which support DMA. On the
other hand, if you use those DMA-enabled CFs, you might get a better
transfer rate and less CPU-utilization because USB relies on the CPU
for many actions (afaik). I've never tried it, though. 

> 
> Second problem.
> 
> I loved using CF on IDE because of the the drive is called hda instead
> of sda. This way it is very easy to call on the hda to boot up without
> confusing with the data drives on the SATA.
> 
> Need to find a way to fix the naming of the drives regardless of how
> many drives are connected. I always had the problem of the names of
> drives changing when one of the drives is removed and then rebooted.
> It will try to boot up from the wrong drive. If anyone knows of the
> solution, please share.

There was a topic "boot Gentoo from USB key" on this list, recently
(started on 08/04/30). You can look into it at gmane.org. Basic idea was
to use an initramfs-script to determine the root-partition by its UID.

BTW: UIDs and/or volume labels are the way to go if you want to avoid
problems with changing device names.

Hope this helps
Florian Philipp

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Re: [gentoo-amd64] OT - Which is better CF or thumb drive?

[Richard Freeman]

Florian Philipp wrote:
> BTW: UIDs and/or volume labels are the way to go if you want to avoid
> problems with changing device names.
> 

This won't help you much with booting but for any other partitions you 
can always use /dev/disk/by-uuid/#### or one of the other directories 
under /dev/disk to help uniquely identify disks.  Another trick I've 
used that works really well is to use LVM (assuming you don't use the 
removable drive with other operating systems).  LVM can figure out which 
device is which by label - ditto for software raid.

For booting I think your only option would be some kind of initrd as 
already suggested, or the equivalent in linuxBIOS if you're really 
daring - unless you can predict how drives get identified on each boot. 
  You might be able to do something tricky like putting a small mirrored 
boot partition on each drive so that it doesn't matter which one boots 
(I already do that with two drives just for redundancy, but I guess if 
you're clever you might be able to extend this).  I'm not sure how far 
you'd get with that with more than two drives - I don't think mda 
supports more than 2-drive mirrors, and grub can't handle anything other 
than simple mirroring).
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