On Sun, Feb 7, 2010 at 9:30 AM, Alexander <b3n...@yandex.ru> wrote: > On Sunday 07 February 2010 19:27:46 Mark Knecht wrote: > >> Every time there is an apparent delay I just see the hard drive >> light turned on solid. That said as far as I know if I wait for things >> to complete the data is there but I haven't tested it extensively. >> >> Is this a bad drive or am I somehow using it incorrectly? >> > > Is there any related info in dmesg? > >
No, nothing in dmesg at all. Here are two tests this morning. The first is to the 1T drive, the second is to a 120GB drive I'm currently using as a system drive until I work this out: gandalf TestMount # time tar xjf /mnt/TestMount/portage-latest.tar.bz2 -C /mnt/TestMount/usr real 8m13.077s user 0m8.184s sys 0m2.561s gandalf TestMount # m...@gandalf ~ $ time tar xjf /mnt/TestMount/portage-latest.tar.bz2 -C /home/mark/Test_usr/ real 0m39.213s user 0m8.243s sys 0m2.135s m...@gandalf ~ $ 8 minutes vs 39 seconds! The amount of data written appears to be the same: gandalf ~ # du -shc /mnt/TestMount/usr/ 583M /mnt/TestMount/usr/ 583M total gandalf ~ # m...@gandalf ~ $ du -shc /home/mark/Test_usr/ 583M /home/mark/Test_usr/ 583M total m...@gandalf ~ $ I did some reading at the WD site and it seems this drive does use the 4K sector size. The way it's done is the addressing on cable is still 512 byte 'user sectors', but they are packed into 4K physical sectors and internal hardware does the mapping. I suspect the performance issue is figuring out how to get the file system to keep things on 4K boundaries. I assume that's what the 4K block size is for when building the file system but I need to go find out more about that. I did not select it specifically. Maybe I need to. Thanks, Mark
