[sf-lug] How not to do main storage (waas: Belated writeup of last SF-LUG meeting)

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Akkana Peck (akkana at shallowsky.com):

> I'm still surprised that problems happened so soon; I would have
> expected it to be good for at least several months. 

I've not retained the technical write-ups I once had, about these
matters, long ago.  But unsuitability of the cheap, casual-use flash
storage media for main storage (used continually for ongoing read-write
cycles) can be predicted from their target intended usage:  When you are
just carrying around files on a USB stick, saving Pokemon Go game state,
or writing digital photos on a camera and copying them off to computers,
you don't _need_ speed, or levelling, or measures to maximise the
usability of their rated read/write cycles.

By contrast, an SSD carefully addresses all of those things, which was
only questionably true of first-generation SSDs, but then greatly
improved _because the target usage needed that_ -- such that I finally
became _fine_, by 2013, with retiring my ancient SCSI-2 server hard
drives on the ancient Rackspace PIII 2U server for a pair of top-rated
Samsung SSDs on the tiny Compulab.

But, as mentioned, even then, I _didn't_ take the path of least
resistance and cross-connect them to the Compulab using USB cables,
carrying both data and power.  Even though it required (also) purchasing
a pair of excellent HP AC-power-to-USB widgets to (separately) power the
Samsung SSDs, I connected the latter (for data transport) over eSATA.

USB is just not specialised for reliable, ultra-fast main storage, and
eSATA is designed exactly for that.

-- 
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