Recently in Solid-state drives Category

I've been thinking about building my own very small machine around the dual-core Intel Atom processor with Nvidia graphics. Yes, I know that Nvidia is freedom-hating and all, but I think that for the small form factors such as Mini-ITX, Intel and Nvidia are heading in the right direction when it comes to compactness, power consumption and graphical sophistication.

I usually begin my search with my favorite Mini-ITX vendor, Logic Supply, but I have also begun looking at pre-assembled systems that ship with Linux. Both ZaReason and System 76 are building small boxes around the Intel Atom/Nvidia platform, some single core, others dual core — and I do recommend the latter.

The one stopping point for me, other than money, is that I'm not sure whether or not these pre-built boxes have CPU fans or use passive cooling from massive heatsinks. For years now I've been leaning toward machines with no spinning fans either in the box itself (on the CPU or elsewhere) or the power supply. With Logic Supply I can easily make this happen.

At ZaReason, the Ion Breeze 4220, starting at $399 for single-core, offers a variety of options, including the above-mentioned dual-core Ion CPU. I don't know if Earl, the ultra-accommodating chief technology officer at ZaReason, is offering the option of a fanless motherboard — I'll ask him.

System 76 offers its Meerkat Ion NetTop with dual-core Ion starting at $359.

One thing that ZaReason offers in the Ion Breeze that I like is an optional external fanless power supply.

I've been running my converted Maxspeed Maxterm thin client as a standalone Linux/BSD box almost since the beginning of my foray into open-source operating systems, with only a single fan blowing across the Mini-ITX motherboard and its heat-pipe-cooled CPU. The fan doesn't work when the box is upright, so for all intents and purposes this is a fanless computer, and I've never had a problem with thermal issues — in fact, it runs quite cool, if not quickly with its VIA C3 Samuel processor (that's supposed to be a 1 GHz model but for some reason only runs at 500 MHz), maximum of 256 MB RAM and woeful sound and video chips.

Right now the Maxspeed is running Debian Lenny from an 8 GB CF card inserted in the thin client's built-in CF-to-IDE interface. Yep, no spinning hard drives either.

System 76 does offer solid-state drives on the Meerkat Ion, starting at $110 extra for a 40 GB Intel drive.

If the Intel Atom Ion processor isn't what you're looking for, both System 76 and ZaReason have plenty of other desktop, laptop and server machines to look at.

The best thing about buying a computer from a shop that ships with Linux (in the case of these two retailers, Ubuntu) is that your hardware is pretty much guaranteed to work. You'll have audio, video, suspend/resume, all that stuff that sometimes is hard to get straight on the box that shipped to you with Windows.

In the times I've spoken with ZaReason's Earl, and the company will build, test and ship pretty much anything you want. They specialize in Ubuntu, but you can ask for a box to be loaded with Debian or CentOS, and I believe they'll do it.

Do ZaReason and System 76 charge more than your standard computer seller? Probably. You can't get the kind of bottom-of-the-barrel deals that are offered on the cover of the Office Depot circular, but those machines often do have bits of hardware that you'll tear your virtual hair out to get working properly.

When you get a machine from a company that specializes in Linux, not only will everything work, but you'll get support that will help you clear up any issues.

And for many people — and I'm getting more like this myself with less time available for banging-my-head-against-the-wall tinkering — it's worth a little extra money for somebody else to have figured out all the issues, or in the case of these companies, to choose hardware components that work well with free, open-source operating systems from the start.

And even if you are a tinkerer, chances are it ZaReason or System 76 have built you a machine, it won't just work well in Ubuntu but will be a great platform for other Linux distros you might want to run.

Not wanting to leave out BSD, you can get a pre-built and -loaded PC-BSD (based on FreeBSD) laptop as well as two workstations (prices unknown) from IXsystems, the company behind PC-BSD. They seem to specialize in selling servers running FreeBSD and ask that interested buyers request a quote to receive pricing info. They're also offering CD and DVD sets of FreeBSD 8.0 if you don't want to bother downloading the ISOs and burning your own discs.

Not to go off on a tangent or anything, I've been giving FreeBSD a lot more thought lately. I've run OpenBSD on the desktop as my primary system for about six months, and I'm considering FreeBSD instead for a future test for the following reasons:

• Easier upgrades and much longer cycle
• More focus on desktop users with hopefully better (and more meta-style) packages for things like GNOME
• Flash 9 and possibly Flash 10 support through the Linux compatibility layer
• Better performance
• I really don't need it for architectures other than Intel/AMD (although PowerPC and SPARC 64 are available; side note — on the various pages emanating from its platforms page, FreeBSD offers not only official manuals from the makers of the hardware in question but also links to other BSDs that run on the architecture. A very nice touch, I think)
• Community that actually cares about end users who aren't developers

I need to try some live images of recent FreeBSD/PC-BSD releases. (Is PC-BSD a live CD yet? I haven't kept up, but I did utilize the live environment of DesktopBSD back when I was testing it).

I never did the full review I promised of Dru Lavigne's excellent "The Best of FreeBSD Basics" book, but I find it to be an excellent reference for the FreeBSD and PC-BSD user. Dru is one of the best writers around in the Unix community, and even if you don't run BSD you can learn a lot about using Unix/Linux from this book. I got a whole lot about the shell, file permissions and other Unix sys-admin tasks, from "Basics," just as Michael Lucas' discussion of sudo in "Absolute OpenBSD" makes that now-way-out-of-date book extremely relevant and useful for anybody running any kind of Unix/Linux today who wants to make the most of sudo in their own environment (and especially on the server).

On the same tangentially arrived-at topic, Dru Lavigne's latest book, "Beginning PC-BSD: Frugal Unix for Power Users," is slated to be released three days from now. If past work is any indication, this will be an excellent book for anybody contemplating the use of PC-BSD.

I'd rather Dru write a book on using FreeBSD on the desktop — not necessarily PC-BSD but building out a FreeBSD-based desktop through ports or packages — but I can understand her focusing on PC-BSD given that the iXSystems-led project is a lot closer to what Linux users are used to.

I've enjoyed Zack Whittaker's iGeneration blog on ZDNet for a while now, but his most recent entry really hits you where you live — if you have a lot of stuff on a computer hard drive that you'd really not like to lose in an instant.

Zack accidentally kicked out the power plug on his computer, scrambled his hard drive ... and faces a huge, huge bill if he wants to recover years' worth of data:

Through no will of trying, I have now come to a sound, unfortunate conclusion, that my hard drive is well and truly screwed. My data is fully intact but I have absolutely no way of accessing it. And did I back up my machine? Of course I did – but on a separate partition, and on that hard drive.

A backup on the same drive? Bad idea.

That's why we all should ignore the garment-rending in the geek arena over the privacy implications of storing data in the cloud with a service such as Amazon S3 (via something like JungleDisk) or with DropBox, Mozy or any number of competing services.

Yes, there are problems in the cloud and with off-site, networked backups. But the benefits far, far outweigh the risks of not doing multiple backups in multiple ways and at multiple locations.

By all means, follow Zach's advice and back up to a detachable, external hard drive (preferably more than one). But don't think that's enough.

You don't just need a backup. You need a backup plan — one with the kind of redundancy that a cloud backup can add to one that also includes multiple hard drives stored in different places.

I'm getting increasingly comfortable keeping and viewing all of my photos online. Printing them? Yeah, every once in a while, but not every one, multiple times, like we used to.

I've got thousands of e-mails, most of which I probably could lose without tears but which serve as a huge database of information that I'd rather preserve than do without.

I probably should be making printouts of my "important" writing, should I do anything like that at some point in the future. Yep, paper — though bulky — can be the ultimate backup. Clay tablets are good, too.

But the reality is that my aversion to clutter (yes, despite my immersion in it) means keeping more and more things on bigger and bigger hard drives (I just saw a 2TB model from Seagate ... 1.5 TB is old hat, I guess) and making sure, through multiple backups (and backups in the cloud that are worth paying for), that I don't lose all of this data due to my own propensity for kicking out power plugs, or any number of natural and man-made disasters.

Via the great DragonFlyBSD blog I found this exhaustive article on the state of solid-state hard disk drives and why now is a good time to begin using them.

It's very, very long, and I haven't yet read the whole thing, but I haven't seen anything else come close to addressing the issues of SSDs (i.e. how long they last, how they perform over time, how much they should cost, how fast they should be ...) as this particular article from AnandTech.com.

Distrowatch guru Ladislav Bodner has been rolling more than a few operating systems onto his ASUS Eee PC 900 netbook — probably the most popular netbook out there at this point (they even sell them at Target now).

In this week's Distrowatch (which I recommend as a must-read for anybody who wants to follow what's happening in Linux and the BSDs), Ladislav writes about how a mouse-over problem that tends to freeze the screen in Ubuntu Netbook Remix on the ASUS Eee was solved in the Linux kernel but almost immediately returned due to the relevant patch being pulled from the kernel because it began causing other problems.

Ladislav goes over how you can go backward from Linux kernel 2.6.28-11.41 to 2.6.28-11.40 and get your ASUS working again under Ubuntu Netbook Remix.

He also provides a tip for those using SSD (solid-state drive) disks on how not to wear them out:

Finally, a quick reminder for those who are about to install Ubuntu Netbook Remix (or any other Linux distribution) on a netbook with solid state drives. Since these drives have a limited life span that depends on the frequency of write access to the drives, you can greatly prolong their life span if you follow these two rules while installing your preferred distribution (here is the source of this information, although there are those who dispute this):

* choose a non-journalling file system (e.g. ext2)

* don't create a swap partition

As Ladislav says, there is some dispute about the life of flash media in everything from those mini USB drives and SD camera memory cards to devices designed to replace traditional IDE and (mostly these days) SATA .

Some people have said that the MTBF (mean time between failures) for SSDs is so low when compared to spinning hard drives that the devices will last much longer than traditional spinning hard drives due to the lack of moving parts in an SSD. They say that worry about killing the flash memory with repeated write cycles is overblown.

But others are worried about killing their flash memory too quickly and take precautions such as the recommendation above not to have swap space on the drive.

For those who might not know, most operating systems do use swap space on the hard drive in the event that your computer's RAM (memory) fills up. I won't go into just how much space you need for swap because that's a whole new topic that's been discussed countless times in countless places. (I generally set aside 300 MB for swap on my systems).

Even Windows uses swap (that's one of the reasons your box tends to slow down after it's been running all day [or week/month/year]) — you've got a lot of critical stuff that the OS has written to the swap area of the drive.

Back to flash/SSD memory: As I say, some people think that worrying about excessive writes to flash is unwarranted. While I'm tempted to say that you shouldn't use an SSD on a server, Sun Microsystems (yep, the company bought recently by Oracle) is offering SSD-equipped servers and storage arrays. Sun thinks SSDs are the (near) future in servers since performance gains are too large to be ignored.

Sun is using single-level cell (SLC) flash memory, which has a much longer life than the cheaper multilevel cell (MLC) devices that pack more memory into the same space but have shorter write/erase lives.

We're a bit far away from the ASUS Eee PC and Ubuntu at this point in the post, aren't we?

Maybe. But here's what I want to say about flash-based storage: I'm all for it. I'd like to start moving everything I have to SSDs as soon as fiscally possible.

One thing I really like is a silent PC: no fans, and no spinning hard drives. If you've ever worked on a system with drives snaking out of the back of the case and sitting on a table (I did it for years), you know how much noise traditional hard drives make and how much heat they throw off.

For the energy and noise considerations alone, I'd like to dump spinning hard drives.

To that end, I'm doing one test and hope to do another soon. I've been running my Self-Reliant Thin Client (converted Maxspeed Maxterm) with an 8 GB CF card in the box's built-in CF-to-IDE adapter as the unit's main drive. I am still running Debian Etch on it (and will continue with it until I manage to get networking into the room). The box isn't in heavy use at present, but it is running (and has been this time for more than a week). I do have swap set up on the flash, and with only 256 MB of RAM, it'll probably get used a bit.

I'm running regular backups of the /home files to a 1 GB USB flash drive with rsync, so I have an all-flash system.

It's not fast. A low-end CF card (mine is a Transcend) doesn't have the performance of a top-of-the-line SSD. For one thing, the Transcend uses MLC instead of SLC and for that reason alone should have a shorter life.

I'll keep the box running for quite some time to monitor its progress with the flash memory and see if it can withstand repeated use. An upgrade from Etch to Lenny would definitely tax the CF card.

Another thing I'd like to try is an SSD in one of my laptops — maybe the $15 Laptop (Compaq Armada 7770dmt), which I've recently put back into service. At least the drive is easy to get to.

I'm very interested in Dag Wieers' recent post on why he chose a Lenovo Thinkpad X200s as his new laptop.

Using what developers use is always a good idea. Chances are that more things will work at the beginning, and then it will only get better as those developers start fixing what's broken.

Among the interesting features on the X200s:

• 80 GB solid-state hard drive
• Small and light, yet with full-size keyboard
• Complete hardware-maintenance manual available (VERY important, since laptops tend to break)
• Trackpoint instead of touchpad (I really like the trackpoint on my Compaq Armada 7700dmt; both the functionality and the saving of space with no touchpad) Wi-fi, Bluetooth, fingerprint reader, media-card reader (it would be great if this all worked under Linux)

The Self-Reliant Thin Client — my converted Maxspeed Maxterm thin client — which has been running Debian Etch now for:

steven@maxterm:~$ uptime
11:47:52 up 35 days, 19:55, 2 users, load average: 2.79, 1.74, 0.79

with the OS and all files stored on an 8 GB Compact Flash module, and backing up the /home files via rsync to a 1 GB USB Flash drive just received two Iceweasel (aka unbranded Firefox) updates:

iceweasel
Iceweasel-gnome-support

That brings the system's version of the Mozilla-powered browser to 2.0.0.18.

Unless I've failed to hear about it, Debian Lenny hasn't yet been declared Stable, so Etch — first made Stable in April 2007 — remains the Debian distro of record for those who like things to stay predictable (and not break).

And now for an editorial: I know that the Debian Project does things the way it wants, but I'd sure like to see them decide to give each Stable distribution a defined life span of, say, three years. Yep, just like Ubuntu does with its LTS.

At the current pace, I imagine that Etch will get three years of security patches anyway. That's because once Lenny is declared Stable, Etch becomes Old Stable and at that point gets an additional year of bug fixes and security patches from the Debian Project.

The ability for sysadmins to plan and know how long they can ride a given release is something I find very valuable. Red Hat wouldn't do it if customers didn't want it. And while I think the 7-year-life of a Red Hat Enterprise Linux release is probably more than a little too long for most uses (not that a print server or internal file server needs to be all that cutting-edge). But three years for Debian (I think at this point that two years of support is pretty much a given) is something that its users — including me — could really get behind.

Note: Ever notice how these entries start off so innocuous and then somehow morph into a diatribe? Yep, me too.

Maybe you're curious about how The Self-Reliant Thin Client is doing.

Here's the uptime output:

steven@maxterm:~$ uptime
13:08:07 up 24 days, 21:15, 2 users, load average: 1.70, 1.32, 1.31

Yep, the VIA C3 Samuel (rated at 1 GHz but running in Linux at 500 MHz for some reason) based converted thin client, running Debian Etch from an 8 GB Compact Flash card, has been working continuously for about a month now (I did reboot a few times during this test for kernel updates).

It's still no speed demon but handles the GNOME desktop fairly well. I did add Fluxbox for testing purposes, and I also installed the lightweight Dillo Web browser, but I'm still relying on the Iceweasel (unbranded Firefox) and Epiphany (GNOME's Gecko build) browsers, plus OpenOffice 2.0 Writer (works surprisingly well, even with 256 MB of RAM and 500 MHz of CPU) and GNOME's GEdit text editor.

I even used CUPS (The Common Unix Printing System) to set up a printer the other day. Even though most systems include native printer-setup utilities (GNOME's is extremely primitive), I find it's both easier and more instructive to use CUPS directly via a Web browser. For those who have never done it, open a browser and go to the following URL to access the CUPS interface:

http://localhost:631

I usually click on Administration and go from there. If you're asked for a login, that login is generally root, with the password being root's password. I can't remember how this goes in Ubuntu, which doesn't let the users (even the main user) at the root password (if there even is such a password).

Ubuntu's root/sudo situation is another kettle of fish for another post, but for most of us, the key to CUPS is using the root login and password to add or modify printers.

I will close out this entry by praising Debian Etch for being so solid on this (and just about every other) platform.

As of today, here are all the machines I use and what they run:

At the office:

Work box:
Dell Optiplex GX520
Pentium 4 (3 GHz)
512 MB RAM
Windows XP SP2

The Debian Mac:
Power Macintosh G4
466MHz single PowerPC processor
384 MB RAM
Debian Etch

The Self-Reliant Thin Client:
Maxspeed Maxterm 5300(??) thin client
VIA C3 Samuel (1 GHz, running at 500 MHz for some reason)
256 MB RAM
8 GB Transcend Compact Flash module as boot drive
1 GB USB flash drive for backup
Debian Etch

At home:

iBook G4
1 GHz CPU
384 MB RAM
120 GB Fujitsu hard drive (replaced by me in a 3-hour odyssey)
OS X 10.3

This Old PC:
Pentium II MMX (333 MHz)
256 MB RAM
10 GB hard drive
Windows 2000 (I haven't booted this or connected it to the Internet in over a year)

The $0 Laptop:
Gateway Solo 1450
Mobile Celeron (1.3 GHz)
1 GB RAM
30 GB Toshiba hard drive
Ubuntu 8.04 LTS, Debian Lenny, Puppy 3.01

The $15 Laptop:
Compaq Armada 7770dmt
Pentium II MMX (233 MHz)
144 MB RAM
3 GB IBM hard drive
OpenBSD 4.2

I have quite a few machines in various states of repair that I might resurrect over the next year if and when I get the time, but this is what I have right now. With the exception of the white-box This Old PC, all of these get fairly regular use.

I decided to start adding apps to the Self-Reliant Thin Client, which is running Debian Etch from an 8GB CF card as the boot drive with a 1 GHz VIA CPU that insists at running at 500 MHz, plus 256 MB of RAM.

I used aptitude to add the Geany text editor and the Fluxbox window manager.

Fluxbox runs great, as usual, but I really don't see any app-speed improvement with Iceweasel, OpenOffice, Geany or Gedit.

In previous tests, I saw a real advantage to using Fluxbox or Xfce over GNOME, but here in Debian, GNOME is running well enough that I'll probably use it quite a bit. I'll continue testing Fluxbox, but I imagine that GNOME will continue to be my main window manager on this box (as it has been when running off of a traditional hard drive).

It definitely depends on the specific box, and especially on the available RAM. I guess that 256 MB of RAM is enough for good GNOME performance. With 128 MB of RAM, Xfce, Fluxbox, Fvwm or other lightweight window managers might dramatically improve performance vs. GNOME.

One thing I have to do is run top when running the same apps in both GNOME and Fluxbox. If the same amount of swap, relatively speaking, is being used in both window managers, that tells me why my GNOME performance is so relatively good. But if there was a lot more swap used in GNOME vs. Fluxbox, then I'd know that the lighter-weight window managers are really making a difference.

I have my Self-Reliant Thin Client running Debian Etch turned on all of the time. I haven't been able to find power-usage specs for the Maxspeed Maxterm (it could be a 5300, but there are no model numbers on the box), but with no moving parts, a Mini-ITX-size motherboard, Mini-ITX-type fanless power supply and fanless VIA C3 Samuel CPU, as well as non-working case fan (except when tilting said case at a 45-degree angle) and a Compact Flash chip instead of a spinning hard drive and no optical drive, the thing is totally silent and must be fairly sparing on electricity use.

I don't think I even moved the mouse yesterday, but today when I brought it out of screen-saver mode, there were three updates to Debian Etch:

dbus
dbus-1-utils
libdbus-1-3

Thus far, the 8 GB Transcend Ultra Speed 133x Compact Flash is performing quite well, meaning it hasn't died.

The last time I killed a CF chip, a 1 GB Transcend, I think the premature death occurred due to inserting or removing the module while it was mounted.

Since in this case I have the Self-Reliant Thin Client sealed, that CF chip is staying in there and won't be plugged and unplugged all that often.

That might stay true, but I want to get more CF chips and load different OSes on them. Then I could remove the cover to the CF-to-IDE board in the thin client and pop in and out different CF cards with totally different configurations.

Some of the CFs I'd want to do:

• Puppy Linux (could be a much smaller CF due to the nature of the Puppy distro and its "frugal" install)
• OpenBSD (I'm anxious to see how easy/difficult it would be to install to CF)
• Wolvix (which also offers a "frugal" install, though I'd chose a "traditional" hard drive install so I could use slapt-get/Gslapt to update the box)

Not having an optical drive hooked up makes the "preparation" of CF cards on the Self-Reliant Thin Client difficult. To install a new OS, I'd have to:

• Remove eight screws to open the case
• Remove the CF card cover
• Remove current CF card and plug in new one
• Unplug the CF board's IDE cable from both the CF board and the motherboard
• Plug in a standard IDE hard-drive cable into the CF board on one end, the motherboard on the other
• Plug CD-ROM drive into "middle" of IDE cable
• Plug hard-drive-style power cable (the thin client has one, even though it doesn't need it for its intended purpose)
• Install new distro (and probably do more than one so I don't have to repeat this procedure)
• Test new distro
• Remove IDE hard drive cable
• Plug CF board's IDE cable into CF board and motherboard
• Replace case cover

I could leave the CF board/adapter's cover off if I wanted to do a lot of swapping of CF cards. It would be a very easy plug-and-play way to swap distros, that's for sure.

And I could keep the current 1 GB USB flash drive plugged in for backups of the various systems. That would also facilitate file-sharing between the OSes on the multiple CF cards.