[rescue] Fixing the NVRAM battery in the SS5

[Peter]

Bryan Gurney <arb_npx42 at comcast.net> wrote:
[...]
> Other dumb question to throw in the mix: is anyone making flash
> drives that hook up to 80-pin SCA?

No, but if you can cope with 50 or 68 pin SCSI, you can use an ACARD
SCSIDE, a PC Engines CFIDE and a commodity CF card. Admittedly, I've
not tried this, but I've got the parts here if you want me to assemble
and test them.

Mind you, if you're going to order from PC Engines, you may want to
have a look at the WRAP. I've got one here and it's quite fun to play
with. It's really intended as a wireless router, but mine runs
Asterisk just fine.

> That would make for a seriously quiet Sparcstation, and not having
> to worry about hard drives failing as much (but I think that flash
> memory does go corrupt over time, and I've heard that it's not as
> conducive to having data pushed all over the place).

Early flash was rated at 10k writes, modern stuff supposedly goes up
to 100k. Wear levelling remaps the blocks to avoid hot spots, which is
just as well given most CF cards are formatted FAT. But you're still
probably not going to be able to write more than about 30k times the
capacity of the card before it packs in.

I'd say a good modern disk from a decent manufacturer (so avoid
Maxtor) will last you longer than any form of flash, especially if you
throw RAID into the mix to avoid data loss.

My personal favourite is Seagate, but I don't know what the quality is
like now they've taken over Maxtor. With any luck, Maxtor drives will
become Seagate quality rather than the other way round.

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