Thanks for informing me of the drawbacks of my idea of using the pendrive. I suppose it isn't a good idea seeing as how you only get a limited number of writes to it.

About the  solidstate drives: I guess i have a wish list now:D

Seriously though my dad says they have memory on PCI so I will look into that.... then hesaid he would give  me his computer after he finished digitizing all of his vinyl. It is a Presario with 256M  of RAM and an AMDK7. Hmmmmmmm, presario isn't known for it's Linux friendliness is it.

---- Empty <plug@emptiedout.com> wrote: 
> If you really wanted to do this, the thing to do would be a solid-state
> hard drive. Basically these are memory boards controlled by a hardware
> SCSI emulator, so the computer thinks they are an actual hard drive.
> They are expensive, and many are a pain to get working under Linux, but
> they can be very very very fast. I had 5 SMTP servers once that we added
> these to... After switching the qmail queue dir to a reiserfs fs on the
> drives the things totally hauled ass and 2 ended up pulling the load 5
> were previously.
> 
> The problem, though, is you lose the FS on reboot or power outage. Ours
> had a secondary power supply that we plugged into dedicate UPS's- just
> keeping data in RAM alive is pretty cheap, juice-wise, so the UPS could
> keep it alive even after an hour of no power.
> 
> The only reason I can think of to do that is if you have a single server
> you cannot upgrade any further in terms of RAM and it is bound on swap I/O.
> 
> > what are the drawbacks to doing this? how could I automate this?
> 

> It will eventually die a nasty death, and you really don't want that to
> happen to swap.
> 
> > man! why do most computers even have hard drives! Unless you are running a 
> > business.....
> 
> Solid-state storage simply is not ready to rely on in such a capacity.
> Jon Hansen hit the nail on the head with the flash storage problems, and
> especially in a swap capacity (eg lots of writes) the limited lifespan
> is a real problem. Great advances are being made in this area, but it
> will be some time before spinning platters go the way of the 5.25" floppy...
> 
> ~Ben
> 
> -- 
> ---
> "Confession only helps if you actually feel bad for your actions.
> For you, it would just be a really long boast."
> 	-Tara
> http://www.emptiedout.com
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