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Any old machine, or even better an old laptop (less power, less noise, less room).

Solutions for hybriding flash drives and hard drives have been experimented to save power on laptops, but it is quite complex in the general case and there is no final-user implementation yet, and the gains are limited on an everyday use machine. However it is a lot more efficient and simple on a server, as there are a lot less interactions with users and the panel of activities is largely reduced. Hence you only have to put on flash disk a few directories and files that the system regularly write to (the cache in RAM is enough for reading), and the disk can remain spun down for hours or days if you don't start unusual applications.

You need an USB stick or SD Card of at least 2GB (4GB is advised), and init scripts to mount and fetch during early boot process, and unmount and flush during late shutdown process. For instance I wrote those for Gentoo: /etc/init.d/fcache and /etc/conf.d/fcache, and add it to the boot runlevel (rc-update add fcache boot).

The main directories you need to take care of are:

• /var
• /tmp if not already mounted as tmpfs in ram

For files, create a ~/.fcache directory, and move all the files you want to cache to it. Then either create a symbolic link or configure the program to use this new location:

• ~/.history : shell history for all users including root; set the new location with the $HISTFILE environment variable for zsh in .zshrc file.
• ~/.xsession-errors: gdm file; works with symbolic link.
• ~/.Xauthority: xauth file;
  • for GDM: set [daemon] UserAuthDir=/home/cyril/.fcache in /etc/X11/gdm/custom.conf
  • for SSHD: set XAUTHORITY=/home/cyril/.fcache/.Xauthority in ~/.ssh/environment, and PermitUserEnvironment yes in /etc/ssh/sshd_config
  • for the rest: set export XAUTHORITY=/home/cyril/.fcache/.Xauthority in ~/.zshenv file (or if there is somewhere else upstream enough to avoid previous point for SSHD it would be better)

You can use a script similar to this one to monitor what files are being used and add them to the cache (you can then grep “sda” and “dirtied”):

#!/bin/sh
 
dmesg -c
rm -f /mnt/ram/disklog
#sudo sysctl vm.block_dump=1
echo 1 > /proc/sys/vm/block_dump
watch "dmesg -c >> /mnt/ram/disklog"
echo 0 > /proc/sys/vm/block_dump

If you want to monitor if your drive remains spun down, you can use the following command:

hdparm -C /dev/sda