Mikrotik keeps writing to disk... :-/

RouterOS General
1

Hi all!

My installation keeps on writing to disk, even though I have turned off all ‘store-on-disk’ options with graphing and only log critical evens to disk. Every 5 minutes it writes 184 sectors to disk. And since I’m using a CF, I’m afraid my CF can’t handle this forever… :confused:


See also this thread.

NB. I have a 2.9.2 installation. Since there is no mention that this is a known problem that is fixed in 2.9.3 I’m not upgrading yet. My reason for this is that I want to prove Mikrotik support wrong on this issue :smiling_imp:

2

have you rebooted after disabling those things?

And yeah, i hear you :smiling_imp:

3

No, I haven’t…

Should that be necessary? After all, this is not M$ Windows… :sunglasses:

4

Well, I’ve now upgraded to 2.9.4, rebooted and STILL every 5 minutes there are disk writes taking place! Even slightly more than before the upgrade/reboot. Now it is writing 196 sectors each 5 minutes…! :open_mouth:

What else writes to disk, besides logging & graphing…?

5

can you at least send a supout.rif file to us ?

6

I think flash is better managed that it previously was. Take a peek at the mtbf mentioned on this compact flash:

http://www.dpreview.com/news/0411/04111002sandisk_highcapindcards.asp

CF and PC cards offer extended temperature ranges, extreme endurance, an MTBF (Mean Time Between Failures) of 3 million hours, extended shock and vibration resistance, complete serialization and traceability, and a seven-year warranty. The standard grade cards offer a competitively priced product with high endurance and 1 million hours of MTBF.

So - 3 million hours for their better ones, and 1 million hours for the standard ones. Let’s see … how does that translate into numbers we can understand?

1,000,000 hours is 41,667 days which is 114 years!
3,000,000 hours is 125,000 days which is 342 years!

How is this possible? Manage the physical flash medium by wear leveling and dumping bad blocks. It might shrink a little but not much if managed correctly. My dad invented the first removable flash disk and then an OS to sit on top of it, pretty cool stuff. Its used in almost everything now in some form or another. What a ‘flashback’ that is.

7

But CF’s still have limited writing durability, right?


normis, I have emailed the supout to support. Hope to hear from you guys/gals soon! :sunglasses:

8

I’m not sure which filesystem RouterOS runs but i’ve noticed that most open source ones do not support bad blocks.

9

RouterOS seems to use ext3, I think… :sunglasses:

10

Well, according to the ChangeLog this problem is solved in 2.9.5. We’ll see… :sunglasses:

Let’s hope my CF will survive a bit longer, now that it already has 1.5 million sector-writes… :confused:

11

we use flash disks for more than 5 years here. and i have never seen one that has died because of many writes. only like dead on arrival

12

Well, it’s not the time that makes the difference, but the amount of write actions… :sunglasses:

How many sector writes have been performed by now on those 5 year old CF’s?

13

  1. total writes means the total writes in all sectors. But the limitations that you talk about are applied to each sector. so calculate how big your drive is, and how many sectors there are and you will see that the situation is normal. total writes is nothing that you should worry about

  2. we have a CF that has 1.3 million total writes since last upgrade, and the router has been operational for a few years.

14

Hmm… My CF is at 1.5 million now. This CF was fresh when I installed 2.9.0 on it. I wonder how many writes it will have by the time we reach 2.9.28 :wink:

15

A customer of ours had a CF that had 665 million writes on a 128mb IDE slotted flash disk. It ran v2.8 series since v2.8 was beta doing pppoe nas work.

It was unreliable for a while before anyone caught on.

16

So somewhere between 1.5 & 332.5 million sector writes I’ll get in trouble with my 64 MB CF? :wink:

17

I think a HDD would start getting bad sectors sooner, so where is your alternative ?

18

How about one of these? :laughing:


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floppy_disk#Origins.2C_the_8-inch_disk

19

most of my remaining floppies are unreadable. but i haven’t used any for some years now :slight_smile:

this is way off topic. resume - there is no problem, and nothing to worry about.

20

Correction: As of version 2.9.5 there is no problem anymore! :sunglasses: