auditodd at comcast.net wrote: > OK, so I've heard all the "great" news about SSHD products. > > Here is one example: > http://www.sandisk.com/Oem/Default.aspx?CatID=1477 > > And I've found this 2GB SSHD for a decent price (all things considered): > http://ec.transcendusa.com/product/ItemDetail.asp?ItemID=TS2GIFD25 > > But then I read that they are all "flash based" which leads me to wonder, just how long will one of these "miracle" hard drives last? > > Has flash based memory MTTF specs increased enough that these solid state hard drives will last 3-5 years before failing just like a normal platter-based hard drive? > > I'm using an archaic 3GB hard drive in my Smoothwall firewall and while it whines a little when spinning, it still functions. I also know that there are "hacks" out there to run Smoothwall from RAM utilizing the hard drive as a read only device (people do this with compact flash drives), but that is a lot of extra work that I don't feel like bothering with. > > My next project is going to be a low-power firewall with a mini-ITX board and one of these solid state hard drives would be ideal IF they have a decent MTTF rating. > > Thanks for any/all input/feedback. > > -- > ========== > Todd Young > Flash has a fantastic MTBF if you don't write to it, which for a router/firewall you hardly ever do. I typically boot routers and firewalls off flash, if they need extra functionality I hang a regular hard drive off them but set it up so that a hard drive failure doesn't keep the system from coming up multiuser and routing. I've also booted fileservers and such off flash when they had striped software RAID arrays that weren't bootable directly and I didn't feel like making seperate filesystems off the RAID for booting from. In either application the flash has been far more reliable than any hard drive ever will be. Pretty much every hardware router and firewall out there owes it's reliability to the lack of a hard-drive. You can get an IDE-> compact flash adapter and 1 gig flash card from newegg for ~$30 or so after shipping. More than enough storage for a firewall/router. -- Thanks, Josh Paetzel