Mirrored Laptop with Compact Flash

An alternative to the USB stick to have a mirrored storage on a laptop is to use a PC card compact flash adapter, along with a compact flash card. These cards are available currently in capacities of up to 16GB, but are much more expensive than USB sticks.

For the purpose of demonstrating the concept, I used my old IBM microdrive (340MB) in CFII format. I think the largest ever made was 6 or 8GB, but with solid state cards capable of higher density, that is probably the end of the line for that technology. Still, I've had it for about 7 years now, so it has proven surprisingly reliable (unlike the iPaq this was in).

So, all you have to do is insert the PC card and Solaris hald (Solaris Nevada B56) picks up the microdrive, mounts it and is shown on the desktop.

bash-3.00# df -h
Filesystem size used avail capacity Mounted on
[...]
/dev/dsk/c1t0d0s2 3.6G 3.6G 0K 100% /media/SOL_11_X86
/dev/dsk/c8d0p0:1 341M 16K 341M 1% /media/MICRODRIVE

I then unmounted the microdrive. Assuming you have a free slice 7 on your internal hard disk (make sure you have an empty, pre-allocated slice), then you would do:

bash-3.00# zpool create internal mirror c0d0s7 c8d0p0
invalid vdev specification
use '-f' to override the following errors:
mirror contains devices of different sizes
bash-3.00# zpool create -f internal mirror c0d0s7 c8d0p0

bash-3.00# df -h
Filesystem size used avail capacity Mounted on
[...]
/dev/dsk/c1t0d0s2 3.6G 3.6G 0K 100% /media/SOL_11_X86
internal 304M 24K 304M 1% /internal

bash-3.00# zpool status
pool: internal
state: ONLINE
scrub: none requested
config:

NAME STATE READ WRITE CKSUM
internal ONLINE 0 0 0
mirror ONLINE 0 0 0
c0d0s7 ONLINE 0 0 0
c8d0p0 ONLINE 0 0 0

errors: No known data errors


We can then proceed to set compression and mountpoint just like in the previous case we went through.