*NIX and wear on a CF drive

[beachycove]

A small question, the occasion of which is my inability to get wake-on-lan working in OS9 (tried and failed both in MacPerl and in MacPython) :

If I were to set up a server on a PowerBook (probably Panther OSX Server on a Pismo for AppleTalk support, but maybe NetBSD on an older machine), serving static html, allowing me to ssh in and do what I need behind my router, and with plenty of RAM installed, is there any reason to avoid use of a CF drive?

Basically the machine would sit there 24/7 and do little but fend off robots — only occasionally getting a connection from me — and (if I am lucky) serving a webpage every hour or three. Would this more or less leave the CF drive alone as far as writes are concerned, or does a *NIX system inevitably write constantly to the disk, whether the machine is heavily used or not, and no matter what the RAM complement, meaning that wear will set in quickly on any CF drive?

 

[ChristTrekker]

If you've got enough RAM, it won't be hitting swap (disk) for much of anything. About the only thing writing to disk should be your logs.

 

[theos911]

I've had Tiger thrash a CF card with VM so bad the partition corrupted. I've had no such problems in Linux.

 

[scott]

I'm using a solid state drive in my Slackware system... All partitions are mounted with the 'noatime' option to minimize writes.