Which CF card to buy to boot Linux

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Sat, Feb 16, 2008 at 10:37:58AM -0500, Andrew Malcolmson wrote:
> I'm looking to buy a 4 GB CF card to boot Debian in a hard drive-less
> Via C7 system.
> 
> There's a huge difference in prices out there, I guess according to
> speed.  Does speed matter for doing this?  Are some cards more reliable?
> 
> Suggestions are welcome.
> 
> BTW: there's a Debian package to make all the little adjustments you
> need to run off a CF card such a minimizing writes to the card.  Anyone
> remember what it's called?

I don't remember the name, but I determined it wasn't worth using.  It
isn't being maintained and never worked very well and made a lot of
things a hassle.

Simple things to do is:

- Reduce logging to a minimum
- Don't have swap space at all
- Don't run things that write to disk all the time like databases (at
  least if you write to them frequently)

After that a CF card is really not that bad to use.

Some CF cards support DMA.  This is highly recommended, but only if your
CF adapter has the right design to support DMA since otherwise you get
stupid errors (and have to pass a ide=nodma or hda=nodma option to the
kernel to even use it).

Some CF cards are designed to be more reliable, such as auto write
protecting if the supply voltage starts to drop (you can get interesting
results if pwoer fails in the middle of a write, potentially even a dead
CF card in the case of a few badly designed cards.  I have had it
happen).

The CF card I trust the most right now out of the ones I have worked
with are Silicon Systems SiliconDrive CF.  DMA support, about 9MB/s read
speed (a bit less writing of course), auto write protection on power
loss and such.  The one that totally died was an older design Sandisk,
but newer designs should be immune to that behaviour.  Transcend cards I
currently am very suspicious of.  SMART Modular Technologies seem
reliable, except their DMA support seems broken (as in they claim
support, the system tries to use it, but it seems unstable when DMA is
enabled).

--
Len Sorensen
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