Re: [gentoo-user] {OT} SSD instead of RAID1?

[Grant <emailgrant@gmail.com>]

>> ... What if I bought a low-price/low-capacity SSD drive for each
>> of these systems, installed the system essentials on them, and used my
>> existing high-capacity HD drives for data storage?  Would each system
>> keep running if the HDs died?  If so, I think that would offer as good
>> or better system reliability than RAID1.  What do you think?
>
> You don't need to buy SSD "drives" - instead you could use CF cards and a
> cheap adaptor. These are commensurate in capacity & cost with USB flash
> drives (4gig, maybe 16gig?), but CF cards "talk EIDE" and you can get cheap
> pin-convertors allowing you to connect them to EIDE cables and treat them
> like a hard-drive.

Aren't CF cards much slower than SSD drives and HD drives?

> I know of these used in Asterisk based PABX systems & PoS tills with the
> expectation that they're more reliable than disks, and have read statements
> by people deploying quantities of such machines that they've never had a
> failure in years of use.

I like the sound of that.

> I don't know how that really compares to RAID 1 - if you use hardware RAID
> (and you can get hardware SATA controllers for £50 these days) then you can
> assign a hot-spare, and hot-swap a replacement drive with zero downtime.
> With hardware RAID you can still boot if one of the drives fails, but you do
> add the controller as a potential point-of-failure.

Would the system keeping running if I used a CF or SSD for the system
install and the HD drive died?

- Grant