On Fri, 2002-12-13 at 12:04, Patrick Grantham (at work) wrote:
> I self proclaimed "expert" tells that - no uncertain terms - that Unix (and
> Linux) trash hard drives after two-three years. What he says is that
> because of the heavy load that Unix puts on the heads and actuator, they
> wear sooner than they would on a M$ box. Could this have been true at one
> time? I've been in this game a while (albeit on the M$ side of the fence,
> but on the Linux side for about 3 years now. Sounds like bunk to me. Any
> thoughts?
what crack is this guy smoking?
he has no idea what he's talking about.
a) MTBF is based on a buncha drives sitting on a shelf all going
balls-out 100% TRYING to make them die. If you've ever heard a drive
doing a read/write head test, it sounds like a machine gun. NO OS, no
matter how overloaded, is EVER going to stress a drive like an actual
drive stress test.
b) Linux has an incredibly efficient disk cache. MUCH better than
MS's. Reads can frequently be cut way down and writes are generally
lazy/async, which gives the kernel to schedule them in "batches" to
stress the drive less. (Most BSD's turn on syncronous writes, which is
a big contention between the BSD and Linux camps. Linux enthusiasts
like async writes, while BSD enthusiasts insist that syncronous writes
are much safer and any extra wear on the drive and/or performance impact
is worth it for getting your data on disk immediately.)
c) Recent Linux kernels (2.3 series plus) have IDE "elevator"
optimizations put in. That means that the kernel "schedules" writes to
the drive so that if, for example, you're writing to cyls 10, 23, 4, 17
and 9, it will reorder them to write 4, 9, 10, 17, 23. Much more
efficient, much faster, less stress on the drive.
d) tell him "extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof" and ask
him to back up his claims. if he can't call "ass-talking" on the guy
and never listen to a thing he says ever again, and make sure everyone
who you know knows he's a complete idiot.
e) Smack me in the head with a fish for even bother replying in such
depth to such an obvious troll....
--
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#!/usr/bin/perl -w
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usage: qrpff 153 2 8 105 225 < /mnt/dvd/VOB_FILENAME \
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