timothy johnson wrote: >I just bought a 120GB harddrive and an external case for it. Just >wondering if its normal for it no to be fuild when writing to it. I am >backing up some data, and notice in gkrellm that its datatransfer is >spikey. > > >
This depends greatly upon the filesystem and what data you are backing up, whether it is being compressed, how much RAM you have, etc. Backing up a large numbers of small files (like the 350000 files or so that a typical Gentoo system will have) will take longer to read from your main disks than it will take to write them in the archive to the USB disk. If they also compress well, it would not be surprising at all for the disk to idle for 15-20 seconds, become active for 10 seconds, then idle again. This has to do with the write buffering that occurs in the filesystem and the block layer. As an example, my USB backup disk can write at around 24MB/s...but the backup of my system files (i.e., everything except /home and /usr/portage/distfiles) averages 10-12MB/s. So the disk is idle about 50% of the time. -Richard -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
