Router/Firewall “hard drive”

The 3.5″ 4GB IDE drive in my router/firewall is unhappy. It is making more noise than it used to and it seems slower to use, though there are no errors in dmesg. For a while now I have wanted to remove the hard drive and run solid state storage on it, I could run fanless then too (its a Via C3 MiniITX board) but I have not got around to it. Whilst looking about this evening though I noticed these which I have not seen before. They appear (I love Google) to be good for about 1million writes, which if I log to remote host and nfs mount /usr/portage (yes, my router is a Gentoo box, ‘cos, well, cos it is – any better ideas please speak up) shouldn’t be a problem. I could get a USB key for less money though, and indeed I have a 2GB key, but these look easier and neater (?). Anyone used them? Have an opinion? Anyone going to tell me to buy a Cisco? 😉


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2 responses to “Router/Firewall “hard drive””

  1. zootalures avatar
    zootalures

    buy a microdrive and an IDE CF adaptor (or if you can be confident about not massively overwriting the card, just a plain CF card) both cost considerably less.

    USB key is is not a good idea (you only have USB1.1 on that thing, right?)

  2. al_bullit avatar
    al_bullit

    512 MDM is 68quid, 512 CF and adapter is 36quid. CF cards have only 30% the life of MDM (300,000 verses 1,000,000 write cycles). MD is neater too, but yeah, I guess its almost double the cost and I likely do not need to write to the thing that much if I remote syslog.

    I have USB2 on the MoBo, but when I tried installing an OS onto it it had a habit of hanging and locking up – so I never really tried much more.

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