Advice sought for power management, embedded+packages

[alexplatform]

I've been beating my head against the wall trying to figure out how to solve a seemingly unsolvable problem.

I run N4F embedded on a 128MB flash DOM. to facilitate additional packages (namely sabnzb) I have additional ufs storage mounted via unionfs that is housed on the zvol. The end result is that the disks never sleep. The problem became worse with N4F 9.1 as the disks began to spindown and up constantly and I ended up reverting to 9.0.

Has anyone come up with a way to have additional system storage mounted on an embedded install can eliminate this problem? or maybe just have more sense/intelligence/luck than me?

[armandh]

I think that I would try a full install on a high quality SSD
without any virtual memory [partition] or use a separate high quality small Hdd for that if low on ram.
my thought is that a small Hdd with a swap partition and a partition for often used additions to the OS
would be mostly static information that could be easily replaced

[alexplatform]

That would fix the problem, much like buying a new shirt would fix the problem of laundry.

[armandh]

That would fix the problem, much like buying a new shirt would fix the problem of laundry.

OK find a place that junks large old xerographic printers and grab a hard drive for the always on additions
these 2 or more Gb drives are past their early failure part of the curve

[fsbruva]

If your system storage is now fixed (packages installed successfully, etc), then make an *.img of it, and mount it as a ramdisk. It will load the filesystem to ram, and then only access the zvol when your OS wants to access it. Choose a max size, and you can even make it rw - just like /var on embedded.