RamDisk

[Randy Herban]

Correct, the one I saw in the magazine had it's own power supply.  We are in
a datacenter with dual power grids to the building, redundent UPS systems
for entire building with a generator outside.
So power shouldn't be an issue anyway :o)

But I'm just trying to stir up thought on other ideas and possibilities for
our email.
Anything that I figure out to help my servers I'm happy to pass along and
hopefully it will help others out there.

-Randy


-----Original Message-----
From: David Lancaster [mailto:dml at UNB.CA]
Sent: Tuesday, December 17, 2002 8:09 AM
To: MAILSCANNER at JISCMAIL.AC.UK
Subject: Re: RamDisk


On Tue, 17 Dec 2002, Peter Peters wrote:

> >I had an idea earlier about possibly using some sort of ramdisk to
> >handle the mailscanning and mailq items.
> Allthough most systems are reliable enough and with no-break systems
> one would keep a system up for years. But when something happens you
> would lose everything in the queue.

I believe Randy is talking about a dedicated hardware Ramdisk, complete with
auxiliary power supply (which would of course be UPS'ed, right? ;)

> I have been wondering also because I know somebody who delivers very
> small computersystems running on flashcards. These (the versions with
> 3
> LAN's) are installed as firewall. But there are also versions with 1 LAN
> and those would be perfect for an application level firewall (which I
> believe MS is) if one could keep the queue to a minimal (=0) size.

I don't think you'd want to keep a mail queue of any size on a flash disk.
Flash has a very limited number or erase/write cycles per block. It would
probably wear out fast if it was processing mail. Also, some flash
technologies are actually slower than IDE drives for erasing&writing
operations.
http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/articles/solid-state/index.html#I
NTRO

A non-volatile Ramdisk (seperate power supply/battery backup) seems like a
possibility.

Back in the Apple IIe days, I had a 512k X 2 Ramdisk with a hefty lead acid
battery in a attached box. It was fast, but only had enough battery for 8
hours or so when the power went out.  And as the battery aged...eep!

D.


===========================================================
David Lancaster
ITS ESS
447-3212