[asterisk-users] Flash IDE

[Tim Panton]

On 11 Sep 2007, at 12:32, Gordon Henderson wrote:

> On Tue, 11 Sep 2007, Juan Sandro wrote:
>
>>
>> Hi
>>
>> We have a number offices accommodating 4-6 people each hence it is  
>> very
>> important for PBX to be fanless and silent. We have been looking  
>> at using
>> IDE flash disks also called DOM. The performance tests we have  
>> done so far
>> satisfy our requirements, however we are concerned with DOM  
>> durability.
>>
>> We have installed debian and vanilla asterisk on 1GB DOM. All  
>> seems to work
>> fine at the moment however will DOM last? How long it will last?  
>> Is anyone
>> able to share similar experience? Any other information/tips?
>
> You could read the archives from a week or 2 ago under the heading:
>    Build your own "appliance"
>
> I use these deices, but I unload them entirely into RAM.
>
> I have seen devices (eary mikrotik routers?) with them as live (and  
> ext3
> no less!) filesystems, but I would be very concerend about their  
> lifespan.
>
> One thing to note and this might well shaft you is that they use  
> POI mode
> rather than DMA (or at least the ones I'm using do) so they will  
> really
> crowbar the bus & cpu when doing transfers to/from them, however  
> with only
> 4-6 people and not doing much like writing voicemail, etc. you may not
> notice it.
>
> If you're sticking a "normal" disctibution on it, I'd suggest  
> dumping the
> DOM and getting a laptop type IDE/SATA drive and using that  
> instead. It's
> not silent, but will be very quiet.
>
> Gordon
>

As an extra option, I have a couple of nslu2's running asterisk 1.4  
very happily.
I'd guess 6 users would be about the limit for these boxes as they  
only have 32Mb
of RAM, but they are small, quiet and cheap. One is running from a  
USB harddrive
and the other from a pen drive. In theory you might be able to  
squeeze Asterisk onto
the builtin flash, but I haven't bothered.

Tim.