[luau] No hard drive, only compact flash card

[Hawaii Linux Institute]

There are at least two advantages with regard to flash stick that I can 
immediately think of relatively to hard drive.

First, flash memory has no moving parts.  (Is any one aware that the 
separation between the magnetic head and the disc surface is less than 
20 Angstroms and the disc is spinning at an average speed of OVER 10,000 
miles per hour?)  Second, the access time of flash memory is measured in 
nanoseconds, thus, there is no latency compared to hard disc, which 
typically has an access time measured in miniseconds.

Some new generations of USB 2.0 compliant compact flash sticks can write 
faster than read (and can read and write simultaneously).  While the 
write speed is currently maxed out below 10 MB/s, the technology is 
evolving very rapidly.  If a market exists, a single channel USB 2.0 
compliant CF disc may reach 60 MB/s.  This is similar to the speed of 
ATA/66.  Eventually, who knows, there may be multiple-channel CF discs. 
 And that will be a totally different story.

Wayne

>>I am very suprised no one sells PC like this.  All of the ones I found were
>>cash registers or the like, no general purpose PC's.  I would think this
>>would be great for routers, firewalls, etc.  High high availabilty stuff.
>>    
>>
>
>Given all of the limitations that have been described, I don't see how
>it's all that useful to use CF in a high-availability environment like
>a router or firewall.
>
>PCs are cheap enough now that you can deploy a pair of fully-redundant
>PCs running Linux (or any other Unix-ish OS), on relatively fast hard
>drives, for a few hundred dollars.  Why would you do anything else?
>Why bother with the added complexity of CF?
>
>  
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