[asterisk-users] Asterisk on SLOW solid state disk

[Gordon Henderson]

On Wed, 11 Jun 2008, OCG Technical Support wrote:

> I'm looking at building up a standard asterisk system fanless/no moving
> parts.  I found a cheap solid state disk (Transcend TS32GSSD25S-M), but it
> is SLOW...25mb/sec read 8mb/sec write.

M bits/sec or bytes/sec?

If bytes, then that's a fast device! If bits, then it's about right.

> Has anyone tried a slow disk like this on asterisk?  Will this delay voice
> prompts or screw up ast/linux in any interesting way?

The easy answer is to not run directly off the flash, but to unload the 
flash into RAM and run from a ramdisk. This is what I do in my systems - 
boot off flash into RAM, then everything runs in RAM.

Except a separate partition for voicemail.

Eg:

Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/ram0             136M  105M   32M  77% /
tmpfs                 244M     0  244M   0% /dev/shm
/dev/hda3              64M  1.9M   63M   3% /data

Even if you're running "live" out of flash, it'll be fine as Linux will 
buffer everything up in RAM anyway, so you might have a 'hit' the first 
time round (unlikely though), but after that it ought to stay in RAM if 
you've got enough.

> (I know there are linux distros and Asterisk projects designed to run off
> CF, but I'm hoping to stay mainstream)

I'd suggest rolling your own rather than running directly off flash 
though.

Gordon