So my friend D brought me a dead USB HD. 160 GB, about half full (he said).
XP hemmed and hawed when the drive was plugged in and wouldn't show its
contents. So I popped it on my box (Linux, natch) and got 67 GiB of files
from it, in several big tar files. Yay Linux. Took over two days, because
every time there was an error, it stopped and waited (for what? The error
to fix itself?) for 5.5 minutes (I timed it). Boo Linux.
I tried running two tar processes at the same time, reasoning that it was
using well under half the bandwidth (maybe 950 K/s), therefore the USB
controller wasn't the bottleneck. Whenever there was an error, _both_
processes would stop and wait. Even when there wasn't, the rate was about
1/3 of what one would do, so it was faster to run them serially. Boo Linux
#2.
Now I've got everything I can get, and it's time to put it back. NTFS
writing is unreliable and new, so I chose FAT (vfat). Had to make 3 primary
+ virtual partitions, as XP's formatter won't make a 128 GiB FAT partition
(W98's will, but I can't get the drive to show up in W98).
Copying to vfat is VERY slow -- in 6.5 hours it's written 11.3 GiB, which is
about 500 KiB/s. That's from an uncompressed tar file. It's slower on big
files, pausing for many seconds in the write.
What can I do to speed this up? I have half a mind to create a big file,
format it ext[23], loopback mount it, extract the tar files to it, export it
via Samba, mount it from an XP laptop over wifi, and restore it THAT way.
I'm afraid that's more trouble than it's worth.
Also, my load went way up:
eben@pc:/mnt/temp2$ uptime
16:15:31 up 3 days, 16:43, 9 users, load average: 10.70, 10.72, 10.74
procs -----------memory---------- ---swap-- -----io---- --system-- ----cpu----
r b swpd free buff cache si so bi bo in cs us sy id wa
0 10 2828 12236 6456 635788 0 0 131 118 109 12 5 4 33 57
0 10 2828 12232 6476 635664 0 0 359 194 1358 3928 2 2 0 96
0 10 2828 12092 6472 635732 0 0 154 176 1362 3874 1 3 0 96
0 10 2828 12436 6444 635704 0 0 231 177 1347 3835 1 2 0 96
1 10 2828 12116 6468 635724 0 0 590 176 1396 3914 2 3 0 95
How do I find out what those "waiting" processes are? Can I convince "ps"
to tell me?
-- -eben ebQenW1@EtaRmpTabYayU.rIr.OcoPm home.tampabay.rr.com/hactarQ: What kind of modem did Jimi Hendrix use? A: A purple Hayes. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- This list is provided as an unmoderated internet service by Networked Knowledge Systems (NKS). Views and opinions expressed in messages posted are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of NKS or any of its employees.
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