Disk speed

I don't know if this makes sense. In fact, I'm pretty sure it doesn't. Writing 10 GB to a WD Green 2.0TB drive in a NexStar CX USB 3.0 enclosure connected to an ASUS Z8NA-D6C.

# time dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdc2 bs=1024k count=20480

20480+0 records in

20480+0 records out

21474836480 bytes (21 GB) copied, 704.374 seconds, 30.5 MB/s



real    11m44.375s

user    0m0.029s

sys     0m21.517s

Same operation on an ASUS M2N-MX SE with "only" 4 GB of RAM:

# time dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdb2 bs=1024k count=20480

20480+0 records in

20480+0 records out

21474836480 bytes (21 GB) copied, 847.95 seconds, 25.3 MB/s



real    14m7.969s

user    0m0.335s

sys     7m17.540s

Mind you, Xorg is running also, so that takes up RAM and CPU.

Nice one Google

I might complain about computers a bit. OK, maybe I complain about computers a lot. But last night something jumped out at me that is Just Right. I was trying to find details of a Western Digital hard drive. I'd forgotten that they have wdc.com, as opposed to to the completely unused wd.com. Anyway, I googled "western digital" and noticed the following:

YES! That is so useful, it makes you wonder why they didn't have it before. Or did they and I only just noticed.

Also works: Asus, CPAN, boardcom, youtube. (Woah, 'you' returns youtube. OK, maybe not so strange, considering who owns youtube.)

I wonder what it takes to get the site-search treatment, because the following don't work: Linux, Perl, Apple, Wacom.

I give up

So concluded on how to get partitions aligned on 4k boundaries (WDC WD15EARS-00Z), for ~60 MB/s. But if I add a ext3 FS on top, speed drops to 20 MB/s. With LVM or without.

This makes no sense

The great big huge 1.5 TB drive I bought for Corey is a WD15EARS. One thing all those letters mean is that it's an Advanced Format drive. Which is Western Digital Marketing Speak for "we use the new, modern 4k sector size." But of course the drive reports its block as 512 bytes, because otherwise it would fail under Windows. So hoops must be jumped through.

And some of them make no sense.