One Billion Dollars! Wait… I Mean One Billion Files!!!

Linux Magazine ^ | 6 October 2010 | Jeffrey B. Layton

[dayglored]

> Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of backup tape

I had occasion to recall that old saw a couple months ago, moving a lot of data (though nowhere near 23TB) from one center to another, a couple of miles apart. We've got gig-E-over-fiber between the centers, but because of other traffic on the line, we only saw about 20MB/sec and the transfer time was estimated at the better part of a day. It had to be done quicker than that.

I pulled half of the RAID mirror array, threw it (well, not actually "threw") in the backseat of my car and drove it to the other center, hooked it up, copied, drove back, plugged the drive back in the RAID to rebuild, in half the time it would have taken to transfer over the fiber.

One of -those- days. :)

[rarestia]

IDE or SATA? I had some serious issues with kubuntu a while back. It was a SATA hard disk, 10K RPM, and I could get through the whole installation and configuration part of the install, even get to the KDE desktop, but as soon as I started installing security updates, it crashed. Every single time, randomly during the install process.

Try running ext4 on SSD. I’ve never been so comfortable about a hard disk as I was with my 100 GB SSD. It ran smooth as silk, no data access issues, quiet, and I consistently got 1+ GB transfer rates (between 2 SSDs).

For the record, I would not recommend ext4 in enterprise environments. Linux runs amazingly well on a ProLiant DL360, but I can swear that ext3 ran better on a RAID5 disk array.

[sionnsar]

This is old equipment: IDE. I don't think we have any SATA drives in the house workstations.

I don't remember the details of the stability problem, other than having to reinstall Xubuntu 9.10 several times before I gave up and went to 9.04, which has been quite solid. Was sure glad I had /home in its own partition!

I used Kubuntu for several years, but it became progressively more sluggish with newer releases. Xubuntu 9.04 is not exactly snappy either on this hardware, but responds quickly enough.

[sionnsar]

Desktop users, especially those that have never figured out how to properly organize files can quickly get into a state where they can't find files they are looking for, even if they know it's somewhere on the computer. Your average user doesn't know anything about how to efficiently organize directories and subdirectories. Heck, I sometimes have problems with it myself, and find myself going back through and reorganizing things periodically just to keep things straight.

Ha. Thought I had become pretty good about that, even filing my travel-related documents (flight bookings, hotel reservations, conference registrations, etc.) in directories specifically devoted to those trips (the Powerpoint tree for speaking engagements, for example) -- but yesterday found myself searching for a 13-year-old document that defied such a system. It turned out my manual search got me close, but it was in a subfolder whose name did not trigger an association with what I was searching for.