From: Alexis Rosen <alexis@panix.com> Michael Dillon writes:
You can also try building a machine with a boot device like the 2.88 megabyte floppies. Using the same techniques FreeBSD uses for their boot disks, you can decompress the boot floppy into a large RAMDISK and run that way. Or simply use a ZIP drive for the boot device but run from RAM as before. It's not as good as 100% solid state but it comes pretty close.
This isn't clear to me. Why do you assume a ZIP is likely to be more reliable that a hard disk? ZIPs haven't been around long enough to be sure of this, and HDs are pretty reliable these days. I think his plan was to boot ramdisk unix from it and then to spin the unit down. Spun-down units are fairly reliable, and besides I think the main thrust here was to replace the drive with something that could be swapped easily for upgrades. Of course I'm not saying that I *Want* to use an HD in this situation; flash is clearly a big win. But I don't see how using a floppy or ZIP improves wins. With cold-convenient-swappable IDE drawers that let even a kindergartener swap out an IDE hard drive and high quality 100mb hard drives available for like $50 (at this point you're probably paying more for the snazzy mounting kit than you are for the drive), I daresay the Zip and flash solutions are far too expensive for what they buy you. Take a look at the MTBF on your hard drives and then look at the MTBF on power supplies and floppies, and gee... Alexis is dead on here. Pay more, get less... And besides, as Paul Traina said a couple of years back on the topic of BSDI boxes vs. Ciscos: "Hey, you can't play DOOM on those boring old Cisco routers!" ---Rob