[j-nsp] Will CF sizes other than 256M work ok?

[Richard A Steenbergen]

On Fri, Sep 23, 2005 at 12:54:22PM -0700, Joe McGuckin wrote:
> I've noticed recently that 256M CF cards seem to becoming obsolete. 512M was
> the smallest I've seen in our local camera & electronics stores recently.
> 
> If I needed to pick up an emergency replacement for a failing CF card, would
> a 512M card work ok? I think that partitioning and rebooting from the larger
> card would work, but I wonder about a subsequent "request system snap" -
> would that try to copy a 512M /root partition from the CF onto the existing
> 256M disk /altroot partition ?

I had this exact problem last week. Replaced a flakey 96M CF with the 
smallest thing I could find at the store, which turned out to be a $40 
512MB SanDisk CF. It works fine, the software is intellient about how 
much it will partion on the CF and HD root.

FYI for folks interested in seeing the S.M.A.R.T. specs on their drives:

(from the shell, as root)
router% /usr/sbin/smartd -oa /dev/ad1

To get an idea of how old your drive is, look at the line:

(  9)Power On Hours Count    0x0012   020   020   000       0000000089dc

Aka 89dc(h) power-on hours. Convert 89dc from hex to dec and you see that 
this drive has been powered on for 35,292 hours. Well above the 20,000 
hour MTBF spec for these drives, which are also only spec'd for 333 
power-on hours per month.

Yes the CFs do seem to fail more than the HDs, but with many folks still 
operating 5+ year old RE-333's which have been in continuous operation, 
you should expect to see more failures soon. If you're going to replace 
your drives, using the Hitachi Travelstar E-series drives which are 
designed for 24/7 operation in blade servers is highly recomended.

-- 
Richard A Steenbergen <ras at e-gerbil.net>       http://www.e-gerbil.net/ras
GPG Key ID: 0xF8B12CBC (7535 7F59 8204 ED1F CC1C 53AF 4C41 5ECA F8B1 2CBC)