CompactFlash or laptop HDD for home-office server?

[dookka]

My mini-itx server has two 3.5" HDDs in RAID 1, running Ubuntu Server 8.04.

I want to add another drive mainly to separate the OS from the data, but also to get some noise and power savings by using a low-power drive and allowing the big drives to spin down at least overnight.

My root partition uses 1.6GB with the data in other partitions; I have two free IDE interfaces but no SATA and no room for a third 3.5" HDD.

I figure for the same price, AU$65, I can get either a 160GB 2.5" IDE HDD or a 4GB Compact Flash (266x SLC) plus CF-IDE adapter. The cool kids are going for SSD these days but as I don't run with the cool kids I thought I'd ask here:

Is CompactFlash acceptable for running a 24/7 Ubuntu 8.04 server?
Or am I better off with a laptop HDD and gaining some extra GBs?

(I may update to Ubuntu 10.04 when the time comes, but I'd have to move some services to a 8.04 VM so I haven't made up my mind.)

 

[00Roush]

Either would most likely work just fine but here some differences you might want to note. Compact Flash drives are not designed for constant use. Also chances are they are have slower transfer rates than a hard drive. Laptop hard drives have moving parts which would generally be considered more prone to failure than a Compact Flash drive.

Not sure if that helps much. My own personal choice would probably be a laptop hard drive. The reason is I could most likely use it for many other tasks down the road if it were no longer needed in the server. A Compact Flash drive on the other hand is a bit more limited in what it can be used for. Just my opinion though.

00Roush