[geeks] industrial USB flash drives, and other solid state Solaris storage

[Shannon Hendrix]

On Apr 20, 2008, at 00:57 , Lionel Peterson wrote:

>> From: Shannon Hendrix <shannon at widomaker.com>
>> Date: 2008/04/19 Sat PM 10:42:21 CDT
>> To: The Geeks List <geeks at sunhelp.org>
>> Subject: [geeks] industrial USB flash drives, and other solid state  
>> Solaris  storage
>
>> Solid State Solaris Storage... heh...
>
> <snip>
>
> Not to be ignorant (well, not *trying* to be anyway ;^), but why are  
> you going through all this effoert? Are you trying to find a  
> bootable device that won't take up a drive bay? Be faster than  
> spinning media? Is more reliable than conventional media? ALl the  
> above?

I'm just looking at what is out there.

I think I've spent a total of 2 hours on it so far, mostly just reading.

> It seems to me you have many great answers, but without having one  
> specific goal, it is hard to choose a "winner".

If you have one specific goal, then you already have your winner, and  
you are in the implementation phase... :)

Seriously, the point is to look at what is out there and pragmatically  
available, and see what configurations you can come up with, and which  
ones suits the problem the best.

To me, this makes it ten times easier than picking a "goal", and  
finding out you didn't do your research and it won't work.

> If I were to implement such a solution, I think it would involve two  
> USB flash drives, in a RAID 1 array, providing a duplicate in case  
> of single drive failure, with minimal cost. (8 Gig USB "thumb"  
> drives are as cheap as $25/each)

Having your root drive sticking out of your case seems to be inviting  
someone to yank it out by malice or accident.  There is only one  
internal USB connection, and using a HUB causes USB performance to  
suck even more, and makes it more unreliable.

Of course, if you barely used the root, it should be OK, but in that  
case, why have a RAID at all?

Also, Solaris non-ZFS RAID sucks.

It's a neat idea, but if I used USB I'd just use one drive, and only  
if I could make it internal.

On a system with several motherboard USB headers, there are some nice  
industrial USB drives made for embedded systems.


-- 
Shannon Hendrix
shannon at widomaker.com