Open Dental Forum

I just tested a new server idea .... holy crap is it fast.

I used a plain jane motherboard and slow AMD64 3400 processor.
Linux boots from a 8 gig Compact Flash card . It cost me like $15 for the ide to CF converter.
Linux, mysql and all the data files are on the CF with room to spare.
I Installed a normal HD for the A-Z files.

I am sure the speed improvements come from the fact data reads and writes to the CF are almost instantaneous

steve

I've never heard of an ide to CF converter. But I think everybody knows this is the future of computing. If it really works, I'm surprised they're not selling stock computers like that. Man, I can't stand waiting for my HD. I would pay almost any price to ditch the thing.

Just do an ebay search for" ide cf" and $10 will get ya home



http://cgi.ebay.com/Dual-CF-2x-Compact- ... dZViewItem

steve

so whats the limitations on the compact flash other then storage size?

Yes running Linux on flash works great but be careful about memory wearout. It is real. There are linux file systems that take of wearout (Or so I have heard such as jfs used in my router).
Here is some information about it.
http://ask-leo.com/can_a_usb_thumbdrive_wear_out.html

If you really want speed, get pseduo harddrives made out of regular volatile memory with battery backup. They are even faster.
http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=2480

Or a hybrid drive.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hybrid_drive

On a side note, for the same reason, I do not empty compact flash for my camera till it is full. That way I reduce the wear.

how many read/writes do I get before failure?

murmsk wrote:how many read/writes do I get before failure?

Old flash had 10000 write cycle limit, later models had 100000. Latest claim few million. Yet, an operating system may write it's transient data such as buffers, in certain location all the time and exceed the specs. before you know it. See your winblows swap usage. Even though you have free memory winblows uses swap. Hard drives do not have this kind of limit. I understand that anything can fail but if I see a hard limit on write cycles, I stay away from using it for OS or database storage in business critical systems.

There are some Linux distributions that are designed for running from flash. They minimize flash wear. But I would still use hard drive for data storage. I will be investigating those in few months for my own use. I will post here if I find something interesting.

That is too bad. I am glad I didn't transfer over from the old server. Guess I will have to keep looking

steve

I am more of a hardware guy than software. I am on this forum to support my spouse but this is something that looks promising till we find faster hard drive.
http://dev.mysql.com/tech-resources/art ... cache.html
I hope Dr. Sparks or some other database specialist can read this up and tell us if it will work on opendent and how to implement it. I tried it on test database at home and nothing crashed.