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Small (<= 8GB), slow (really don't care), cheap (<$80) SSD?

I

icrf

Junior Member
I have a RAID server at home that keeps going through boot drives. I'm about tired of it. I'd like something more reliable, something that could live without active cooling. Solid state is the obvious choice, but everything is so damn expensive. My / partition is a whopping 2 GB, and it doesn't have to be that big. The only writing done is the very rare system/package updates, and continual log files from various services. None of that is very time-sensitive, so I don't really care about speed. In my searching, I came across this:

Transcend TS4GIFD25 Solid State Hard Drive (MLC) - 2.5", 4GB, $55: http://www.tigerdirect.com/applicati...&amp;sku=T555-2104

A PATA drive is fine. I've already got a 2.5" -> 3.5" mounting rails and a 44-pin -> 40-pin + molex IDE converter from a previous project, so that's not an issue.

I guess my question is, has anyone used or heard anything about these drives? All my searching just turns up people selling the drive, nobody reviewing it. The negative comments on that site sound mostly like people being surprised about the small size.

If I don't go with that, my other options are to spend north of $100 for an Intel 40 GB drive, which is surely solid, but I absolutely don't need 10 times the space. Staying small and cheap, I've seen various CF adapters, but I don't know how well a CF card would live with lots of small log file writes. I know SSDs are designed with wear-leveling, are standard removable flash drives, too? With an adapter and card, I'm not sure I'd be any cheaper than $55, anyway.

Comments/advice?

Thanks.
Andrew
 
The OS is Debian-stable. All the small writes are in /var/log. I don't install new packages very often, but I do tweak something in /etc on a semi-regular basis that needs to persist.

I had actually bought a 4 GB USB flash device specifically for this purpose about a year and a half ago, but ran into some problem with it. Unfortunately, I don't remember the problem, which probably means I should just try again. I was just hoping it had been enough time I could buy a real SSD and not even have to think about it.

Thanks for the suggestions. I'll give USB flash another shot and let you know how it turns out.

On an unrelated note, this was apparently my first (and second) post here in the forums, though I had made the account four years ago. I didn't think I was lurking that bad.
 
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