I am running Slackware 13.0. I run it headless, so it's command line only via ssh. It currently streams 17 songs that are on a playlist in an endless loop. The server is on top of my mini fridge by my bed, so at night, I can see the hdd light blinking every 2 seconds. The light is in blue so it lights up the whole room. I'm thinking about removing the hdd light hehe.

Anyhow, was wondering, because I'm streaming these files, my hard drive is constantly being read. This obviously reduces the life of my hard disk. Should I put the songs on a flash memory stick instead and them playing from there? Should I put the songs in a section of my ram or swap? If so, how would I do so /dev/ramdisk?

Or am I just overreacting and that my hard drive reduction in life by streaming these songs is neglible?

flash memory is a BAADD idea. that will wear out faster than a hard drive. you could make a loop device for memory and play from there. The way you're doing it now will probably shorten the life of your drive by < %10.

How do I make a loop device from memory?

Unless your system is very memory constrained then after the first pass of your 17 songs, I'd expect they'd all be in the filesystem cache anyway so there shouldn't be that much additional disk read activity after that.

You might want to look at mounting the filesystem containing your songs with the 'noatime' option to remove the access time timestamp updates.

Also, you probably want to stop hal from running (especially so as you're headless) as that can cause regular disk activity.

Hi,

How would a read damage the flash memory cell(s)? Where do you get the '10%' for the drive?

If I disable HAL, then when I insert a flash drive, will I still get a message in /var/log/messages that tells me what /dev that flash is under?

Enable blktrace and run the userspace tools to find out who is doing the physical I/O. When you know the real culprit, it'll be easier to target a fix.

Yes, that all happens at the kernel level. HAL sits above all that stuff and is mostly there to support Desktop Environments for things like automount and suchlike. If you're not running X11 and a Desktop Environment then you'll probably find HAL is of little if any use.