Rants & Ramblings

After losing another laptop harddisk to child induced blunt force trauma I got me an ATA-to-CompactFlash adaptor and an 8GB CF card. The adaptor is made to replace a 2.5" harddisk - it has the right connector in the right place and threaded screw holes that match up as well. Since the disk in my PowerBook was kinda flaky I replaced it with the combination above just to see how it would work out.
The card I got shows up as an ATA66 device:

wd0: <SanDisk SDCFH-008G>
wd0: drive supports 1-sector PIO transfers, LBA addressing
wd0: 7641 MB, 15525 cyl, 16 head, 63 sec, 512 bytes/sect x 15649200 sectors
wd0: drive supports PIO mode 4, DMA mode 2, Ultra-DMA mode 4 (Ultra/66)

A bit smaller than the harddisk it replaces but more than enough for NetBSD, X11, KDE and whatever else I need, music and such are accessible over the network anyway so no need to carry yet another copy around.
Since flash memory only survives a certain number of writes I took a few precautions:

• mount everything with the noatime option to disable access time logging. Without it every open() of a file would generate a write to record a time stamp.
• turn off web browser disk caches - the PowerBook has 1GB RAM and the internet connection is pretty fast, no need to waste write cycles with this.
• don't waste much room for swap space. The machine shouldn't need any during normal operation anyway.
• put /tmp and /var/tmp in a ramdisk - no need to waste write cycles for sockets and caches

With all this startup time improved noticeably although it wan't exactly slow to begin with. The laptop is now completely silent unless the fan spins ( which only kicks in when the CPU gets some serious load ) or something mucks with the DVD drive, it also runs slightly cooler.