...more recent posts
You learn something new everyday. It's not always what you want to learn though.
So I have the NTFS drive mounted on the Mac. And my idea was that if I can just get the Mac and the Linux box to connect directly to each other (over ethernet, not over 802.11b to the router) that everything would go much faster. After all their are gigabit ports on both ends.
I thought maybe I couldn't get it to work this way before because I need a crossover ethernet cable. I'm not sure that is true, since the Mac ports are supposed to be auto-sensing, but maybe that's only when connected to other Macs. Anyway I bought the crossover cable and got it to work.
Hallelujah I thought.
Except the copy still only went at 300 KB/sec. WTF? I guess the network connection was not the limiting factor. I wonder what is? I guess it must be the external drive that is the bottleneck. I'm surprised it can't do better than that though. This is a 2 drive RAID-0 connected over 400 Mb/sec Firewire to the Mac (and then over gigabit ethernet to the server.)
In any case, I just went back to doing it wirelessly because that way I can still be on the internet with the Mac while it is copying.
Not sure how this is going to work though since at this rate it will take a *long* time to make the copy. While I figure out what to do I'm just going to let it run (or crawl) in the background. Almost to 1 GB! Only 369 more to go. :-)
Well, HFS+ is supported in the CentOS 2.6 kernel, which was surprising to me, but NTFS (Windows partitions) are not! Crazy. What a pain in the butt. My system can see it, but it can't mount it unless I make unsupported changes to my kernel. Yuck. Maybe I'll just mount it on my Mac and copy it over, but that is going to be even slower. Damn.
Seems like Sun is really kicking butt lately. A year ago I wouldn't have believed it, but that just shows again how little I know. First they released a sub $1000 SunFire X2100 1U server that looks really sweet. And now plans have been revealed for a massive storage monster called Thumper:
The 4U high system will hold two dual-core Opterons and support up to 16GB of memory. A more unique part of the server will be Sun's use of 48 SATA drives.Holy cow. And the key to utilizing all that storage is a new filesystem, ZFS, that will be included in Solaris 10. ZFS sounds *really* amazing. The sort of thing that might make someone consider some really expensive Sun gear. Only now their gear isn't expensive any more. Lookin' good Sun.